Render Network Foundation Website Released + Machina Infinitum and GNOMMA Creator Spotlights(Friday, May 19th, 2023)(BTN)
Introducing the new Render Network Foundation website and Highlighting two working collectives using the Render Network
Exciting news this week as the first rollout of the new Render Network Foundation website is now live at https://renderfoundation.com/ — featuring an all new community hub for The Render Network, including art showcases from some of the amazing creators in the Render Network community! The new hub provides a simple, easy way to find information about the Render Network — from accessing the Artist portal and Knowledge Base to information about participating in Render Network Governance and links to Render Network’s social subcommunities. The website also features a new mechanism for submitting Render Network grant proposals as well as information about the Foundation’s near term roadmap, which will be expanded on in the coming months. A more current, updated whitepaper is going to be added to the site in the coming weeks, and future BTN’s will go into more granular detail about the Foundation’s roadmap.
Creator Spotlights
Two weeks of Creator Spotlights in a row — featuring two new artist collectives using the Render Network (a growing trend on the network)! After featuring Hannes Hummel and the Bloom collective in last week’s piece, the Render Network team wanted to shift the spotlight to two other projects currently using the Render Network. Machina Infinitum and GNOMMA are two exciting projects that have managed to utilize what the world of Web3 has to offer and create work that stands on its own in terms of innovation.
Machina Infinitum
Machina Infinitum Origins
Machina Infinitum is the brainchild of Jesper Nybroe and Matteo Scappin, two European creators that have been blazing their own trails in the world of digital art for years.
Jesper was Scandinavia’s first Flame before transitioning his skills for creative expression over to the VFX arena. Over the course of the following three decades, Jesper built a career that included work on such films as “Black Hawk Down”, “Pearl Harbor” and “X-Men: X2”, and commercial work for brands like Nike, Samsung, IBM and Lexus. Staying closer to home in a sense, Jesper also contributed special effects work to global superstar Björk’s “all is full of love” music video, which became a trend that has carried on to this day, having worked on music videos for Lauryn Hill (“Everything is Everything”), Metallica, Madonna, Travis Scott and others.
While Jesper brings a wealth of artistic experience, Matteo brings a passion for mathematics to Machina Infinitum that has combined seamlessly with Jesper to create something wholly unique.
Matteo’s journey began in his native Italy, in the Dolomite mountain range, where at age 16 he became fascinated with fractal geometry and its relationship to the natural world. Training in computer science and 3D visualization, Matteo began experimenting with infinite procedural 3D structures, creating everyday until eventually this mathematical passion bloomed into a career, where he continues to work on tools to visualize fractals and integrate them in virtual environments.
The Render Network, The Carrousel de Louvre and the Future
Together as Machina Infinitum, Jesper and Matteo have now combined to create several pieces that play off each other’s strengths masterfully. While they have created a number of pieces, Machina Infinitum’s main focus in the last few years has been creating fractal toolsets for professional animators and VFX artists to use, with a focus being creating for OctaneRender. Alongside their work with Vectron for OctaneRender, they’ve also created a realtime fractal plugin for Unreal 5 known as “Machina-Fractals: Essence”, with plans to release a similar plugin for Houdini later this year.
Outside of their technical work, the pair was famously contracted to create a short featured at the Carrousel de Louvre. Their film “Clouds are not spheres” began work with Matteo constructing a fractal formula that would produce the fractal imagery that they intended, ultimately ending up with a heavily customized Mandelbulb with a number of intricately programmed parameters.
From there Jesper began work animating, shading and compositing the piece ahead of its final compositing directly in Flame. However, during the process they came across a logjam: the project required heavy processing and rendering, and the duo only had 10 days within which to turn the film around. It was here that they turned to the Render Network.
“The Louvre short film ‘Clouds are not spheres’ has some really intricate C4D Xpresso system and I was worried that during the ORBX process Octane would not be able to adapt it, but with one click everything worked like magic.” — Matteo
“RNDR (Render Network) saved our Louvre project, we had to create the whole short film in 10 days and rendering it would take months even on 4X RTX 2080ti’s. With RNDR (Render Network), it was just a matter of hours” -Jesper
Since their work for the Louvre, Machina Infinitum has continued to use Render Network in their creative workflow, with some of their NFTs featured on Makersplace and OpenSea being created directly from the Render Network.
GNOMMA
While Machina Infinitum has already established themselves as major players in the creative space, GNOMMA is a new collective emerging onto the scene that is looking to stake a claim in the evolving digital landscape.
What is “GNOMMA”?
GNOMMA (pronounced “No-Ma”), is both a creative collective and fashion brand. As they put it, they derive their name from the genome, “the total sequence of genetic material possessed by all organisms.” As the creatives behind the project put it, the GNOMMA brand, similar to the genome, is a permutation of possibility, and like the genome’s ability to combine into any number of materials and forms, GNOMMA represents a nigh infinite possibility for expression and representation. Taking this inspiration further, the GNOMMA brand bases their approach around biology and all living things in the natural world, admiring both the beauty and complexity it has to offer and representing that in their pieces. In a few short weeks, the GNOMMA platform will makes it debut to the world:
“The official launch is scheduled for June 5th(globally recognized as World Environment Day), which will feature our demo platform, an introduction paper, and an exclusive one of a kind digital asset release inspired by the jungle environment.”
Bridging between Virtual and Tangible fashion
As GNOMMA describes themselves, they are attempting to create a fashion multiverse, where their fashion accessories exist in both the physical and virtual universes.
“By bridging the gap between these two realms, Gnomma allows individuals to express their style and fashion preferences across multiple dimensions, seamlessly blending the boundaries of physical and virtual realities.”
Their shared devotion to creating the “phyigital” assets of the future inspired the formation of GNOMMA, where they intend to create apparel that will clothe the flesh and pixels of any one being who buys them. With the desire to have pieces that live both in the flesh and online, the need to tokenize assets naturally arose, which led GNOMMA to its involvement with NFTs and the blockchain as a whole.
Within the world of fashion there are many subdivisions that carry with them different rules and values, however what is universal is the idea of scarcity: the fabled “1-of-1” items that are wholly unique and become pieces of history and lore, their ownership histories carrying as much weight as the pieces themselves. If this sounds in anyway familiar, it’s because NFTs have very much the same value principles, which made the translation of these “phygital” assets into NFTs a relatively simple 1:1 experience. As the GNOMMA team put it:
“when digital assets are attributed to a non-fungible token (NFT), they become virtually unique, scarce, tradable, and secured, thereby possessing inherent economic value. Consequently, fashion products can be held as valuable assets and traded similarly to real-world art. Additionally, ownership is easily verifiable, and potential buyers can freely access a piece’s holding history by consulting the blockchain.”
GNOMMA and the Render Network
From early on in their process, the GNOMMA team was using OctaneRender for its photorealistic touch that it added to their renderings. From here is where they discovered an essential part of their process, which was the ability to easily export and upload ORBX files to the Render Network for final frame rendering.
“Render [Network] enables us to render animations at incredible speeds without compromising our preferred render and output settings. It even preserves our preferred color space, which is essential for achieving the best results in our workflow.”
As the GNOMMA team discovered, pushing rendering workloads to off-site computing has allowed them to focus on building out the creative and functional aspects of their work, which has ultimately facilitated the birth of GNOMMA at this early stage. They’ve been able to crystallize their workflow into a nine-step system that allows for a near even distribution of creative and technical work.
Join us in the Rendering Revolution at:
Website: https://render.x.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rendernetwork
Knowledge Base: https://know.rendernetwork.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/rendernetwork
Render Network Foundation: https://renderfoundation.com/
