RNDR 2020 End of Year Update

Looking back on second half of the year in RNDR

Published in

Render Network

10 min readDec 30, 2020

RNDR has significantly scaled its distributed GPU rendering network through the second half of 2020, after a first half that saw the network enter the first phase of its public launch. In this blog post, we wanted to provide a deep dive into the latest on network development, recent milestones, roadmap updates and highlight some of the amazing work RNDR users have created — with an all new Best of the Metaverse: NFT Edition.

RNDR Development Update

Development focused primarily on network scalability as we prepare for 2021, when the network looks to significantly expand peer-to-peer rendering, onboarding a wider user base in the 3D community across workflows from motion graphics and VFX to architectural visualization and design. Below are some second half of 2020 development highlights.

Layer 2 Payment System Implemented

With the growth of Ethereum based applications from DeFi, yield farming and NFTs, Gas prices have increased and become more volatile than in the past two years. This is a good thing, it shows that Ethereum and the dApp ecosystem is maturing, and the foundations for a decentralized metaverse are getting built. Nevertheless, it has forced us to adjust our roadmap. In order to more efficiently manage RNDR transaction costs, we moved up our plans to do Layer 2 payments and transaction batching in the roadmap and in October, we released a new payment system bundling payments, which increased efficiency and is setting the stage to implement additional trustless layer 2 protocols like zkSync for scalable, low-cost payments on Ethereum. You can read about the plans here, and we will release additional information as we continue to explore other L2 payments that will help RNDR scale.

RNDR Assigner Rewritten with Optimized for Increased Scalability

To increase efficiency of distributed rendering, RNDR introduced the first iteration of reputation scores. These allow the network to detect failing nodes or jobs, and reassign work in order to minimize network congestion. Note: These reputation scores do not have token economic impacts at the moment. As we release scores with lasting impacts on user reputation and tokenomics, we will publicize these changes so that Artists and Node Operators can understand how to best use the network

Changes to the Assigner and Reputation System are:

First version of Artist Reputation Scores allow us to detect terminally failing jobs and rapidly change assignments to reduce node crashing that creates network congestion.
During periods of high congestion, Artist Reputation scores allow the network to distribute jobs more evenly across the network — for example not letting one user to submit a large amount of jobs at once, taking up all the capacity of the network.
Node ‘Honesty’ Scores allow us to check if a node is performing up to its OctaneBench score, and not running multiple programs in the background. This ensures that the work Artists are paying for is performed close to the quoted OctaneBench score.
Finally, the assigner algorithm has been rewritten to assign faster, and to be stickier with nodes. As a result, the assigner can be used to speed up specific jobs — so that a job accelerates in speed as it is rendering, which increases node efficiency with reduced bandwidth usage and allows the network to reduce queue congestion. The assigner was also written with modularity & maintainability in mind to let us add on features as we grow and more data is available to optimize network usage. We will continue to publish information about the assigner as we develop additional features on top of the algorithm so both artists and node operators can maximize their use of RNDR.

RNDR Client Upgrades

The RNDR client has also been rewritten to handle a wider variety of production scenes on the network, as well as allow the network to scale with fewer systemic congestion issues.

Some highlights include:

Support for larger scene assets and database improvements for assets, increasing the variety of scenes the RNDR can distribute across the network
Reduced node client download times through improved messaging protocol and asset caching to reduce time spent re-downloading jobs
Auto-cancel 100% failure jobs, enabling terminally failing jobs to quickly be quarantined from the network, reducing systemic crashing issues that reduce node efficiency
Additional checks for stalled renders so the client can better detect those and restart when detected.
Additional layer of encryption & security via new messaging protocols
Improved asset caching to prevent unnecessary download, speed up job completion, and spend a larger portion of time rendering
Slackbot for querying historic performance information

RNDR the Metaverse: RNDR Becomes the Place to Create NFTs

While we did a lot of development work in the past few months, nothing has been more exciting than seeing artists use RNDR to create next generation artwork and pioneer a new creative economy of connected digital works. This fall, thanks to many artists in the RNDR and OctaneRender community, NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) built on the Ethereum’s ERC-721 protocol have gone mainstream, attracting some of the leading artists, collectors, curators to blockchain art. Here are some Highlights.

Beeple Takes Crypto Art Mainstream tokenizing #Everydays

This fall Beeple took Crypto Art to a new level releasing two record setting drops on NiftyGateway — all rendered using OctaneRender. In the drops, Beeple tokenized his iconic everyday art — that has been going on a decade plus, showing the power of GPU rendering to accelerate creative workflows — but he is also creating a community around his artwork on beeple-collect.com

Beeple’s second drop broke all the crypto art records for the amount of new people he introduced to crypto art, with all new NFTs connected to physical displays. It is safe to say that we are only beginning.

Pak Pioneers CryptoArt Mechanics and Collaborates with Trevor Jones

One of the early pioneers of NFT auction dynamics, including NiftyGateway’s minting auctions, has been the renown artist and programmer, Pak — also an OctaneRender user. Last week, Pak and legendary painter Trevor Jones released one of the largest crypto art collections in history, paying homage to the iconic artists of the 20th century in a new tokenized cryptoart medium. It will be exciting to see the next release, which Pak promises to add new dynamics to NFT art.

Nick den Boer Releases Crypto Dumps on SuperRare

“Because everybody knows, real crypto art is rendered on the blockchain. It’s the champagne of crypto art.” — Nick den Boer

RNDR power user and creator of Deadmau5’s iconic music videos, released a new series of one of a kind crypto artworks — DUMPS — with physical prints and a special laser engraved USB with 4K originals. All were rendered in OctaneRender and on RNDR, you can follow all of the releases here.

Carlos Marcial AMA on NFTs

One of the early RNDR users and pioneers in the NFT space, Carlos Marcial, sat down with the RNDR team to do an AMA discussing the ins and outs of NFTs from introducing new collectors to NFTs to helping other 3D artists become familiar with Blockchain and cryptoart as a potential platform for monetizing their works and connecting with their fans. Read the AMA on Reddit for more.

Other OctaneRender and RNDR artists are pioneering the next generation of digital art — below is a collection of other OctaneRender and RNDR users creating next generation cryptoart. PS: please reach out to us to add you to the showcase if you use RNDR and OctaneRender and want to be featured in new showcases:

RNDR Milestones and Roadmap Updates

RNDR+ Subscription Releases with OctaneRender 2021 Preview

On Black Friday, OTOY released the next generation of OctaneRender subscriptions, with an all new RNDR+ subscription featuring 100 free RNDR tokens. With RNDR+, OctaneRender subscribers will be able to join the RNDR ecosystem effortlessly, introducing tens of thousands of new artists to the RNDR network Along with RNDR tokens, the RNDR+ tier gives OctaneRender users access to all the new tools joining the Octane ecosystem, starting with the industry’s leading GPU terrain and landscape generator, World Creator, EmbergenFX, the first GPU based real-time simulation system, and Sculptron, OTOY’s standalone temporal GPU mesh sculpting toolset. You can read more about the release here.

RNDR Roadmap Showcased at GTC

At NVIDIA’s fall GTC event, Founder and CEO Jules Urbach, previewed the upcoming OctaneRender and RNDR releases and roadmap for 2021. Please read this deep dive for a more detailed summary:

For RNDR, the major announcement was plans for the new Multi Render Initiative — where new OTOY renderers like Brigade Engine real time path tracer, and Anime Engine, NPR cell renderer as well as third party render engines starting with Autodesk’s Arnold Render, will be added to RNDR. This will expand the amount of 3D workflows that are now supported by RNDR, allowing the network to progressively onboard more 3D workflows to distributed GPU rendering, and providing artists with the flexibility to move between render engines. Below is a video outlining the plans and the full talk is available at NVIDIA’s website.

The talk also showcased Octane X, which is bringing OctaneRender and RNDR to millions of new creative professionals on macOS as well as RNDR SDK AR rendering technologies for iOS and MacOS, with real-time path tracing available now on mobile devices for the first time.

After GTC, Jules also discussed the RNDR and OTOY roadmap on the Mograph podcast with additional detailed information about the OctaneRender and RNDR roadmap.

RNDR Brings Google Cloud NVIDIA A100 GPUs to the Network

In August, OTOY previewed the RNDR Enterprise Tier featuring next generation NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs on Google Cloud with record performance surpassing 8000 OctaneBench. With the RNDR Enterprise Tier, OctaneRender users will get early access to Google Cloud’s new NVIDIA A100 GPU instances with 40GB VRAM, 8-way NVIDIA NVLink® support and 1.6 TB/s memory bandwidth, delivering remarkable memory capacity for blazing-fast GPU render times for the most demanding memory-intensive scenes — which was previously only available with slower out-of-core or CPU rendering. While accessing the industry’s most advanced GPUs on the RNDR Enterprise tier, artists can also use decentralized GPUs on the network for overflow capacity, providing the flexibility to scale renders across thousands of peer-to-peer nodes when on a deadline or for ultra-high resolution formats.

First RNDR SDK Release

In the background of scaling RNDR, we have also been focused on building an SDK for developers to build third party applications on top of RNDR, allowing the network to become a hub for 3D microservices that leverage GPU rendering. We were thrilled to announce a new partnership with Swatchbook this fall to transform the design industry. Swatchbook is an innovative new application that allows designers to virtually collaborate while developing new sneakers on everything from the look to the actual sourcing of materials and creation of a complete BoM. Swatchbook now uses RNDR in their app for high throughput 3D swatch renders, where a designer can rapidly request large numbers of permutations of designs to be rendered, and distribute that across RNDR’s P2P network. For the launch RNDR, created an API to launch jobs that is the first building block of the RNDR SDK.

ITMF Spec Released

On September 30th, the Immersive Digital Experience Alliance was proud to release the version 1.0 suite of specifications for the Immersive Technologies Media Format (ITMF) along with the white paper An Overview and Comparison of Scene Description Formats.

ITMF version 1.0, based on OTOY’s ORBX format, is a media format for immersive media that packages 3D assets for interchange between digital content creation (DCC) tools. It also serves as a basis for a primary source or mezzanine distribution format that can be used in a media and application aware network with the ability to adapt 3D content for current displays, VR/AR HMDs, and emerging volumetric and light field displays.

To learn more, please download the ITMF specifications and white paper or participate in future work by joining IDEA — all available here.

Other Milestones

10,000th Scene Added to RNDR
100+ Concurrent Nodes on a Job

These highlights show the scale that RNDR is achieving and in the fall, the network saw roughly 30% month over month increases in usage, while maintaining a balance of consistent supply and demand.

Copper Support for RNDR

Best of the Metaverse — Additional New Years reading

ETH 2.0 Released — introducing Proof of Stake to the ETH ecosystem
Varjo previews next generation immersive VR headset with huge FoV/
Beeple Fireside Chat in Somium Space, and discussion with crypto-artist Coldie for CrytoArt Week this fall
Lil Miquela goes to crypto, breaking cryptoart records to raise money for Black Girls Code
Vitalik Buterin looks back at the first decade of Crypto and what the 2020’s might look like in: Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond
In January, OctaneRender cinematography masterclass — School of Motion 3D Cinematography Course launches with Octane artist David Ariew

While it has been a big past few months, we think this is just the tip of the iceberg for blockchain 3D computing and NFT artwork, and are very excited for 2021, when we enter the roaring 20’s.

Finally, if you are an OctaneRender user and are interested in joining RNDR as a Node Operator, please fill out this survey and we will quickly add your GPUs to the network.

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/