RNDR 2020 First Half Update
It has been a remarkable past few months for RNDR — highlighted by the RNDR Public Release in April, the OctaneRender 2020 launch with integration into the RNDR client, and a comprehensive preview of the RNDR development roadmap at GTC Digital this spring. With these releases, RNDR is now available for all current OctaneRender subscribers or box license holders to use at rndr.otoy.com — with automatic access when subscribing, upgrading, or buying the latest version of OctaneRender.
To help make RNDR more accessible, the network released RNDR Credits — providing Paypal and Stripe based payments to use RNDR, simplifying the transactional process for OctaneRender users. As the network looks to simplify transactions and increase usability, RNDR was thrilled to be included as one of the new assets that Coinbase is reviewing for inclusion on the world’s leading crypto marketplace.
Finally, this past week, OTOY launched two milestone releases that dramatically expand the RNDR ecosystem. Octane X PR 1 for macOS for the first time made OctaneRender and the RNDR ecosystem available to millions of new Apple creative professionals natively on macOS while the EmberGenFX Beta with OTOY Sculptron introduced game changing GPU based procedurally driven volumetric and mesh based sculpting workflows to Octane users. These releases bring new users to the Octane and RNDR ecosystems as well as improve workflows for ultra-realistic graphics in fast growing uses like gaming, simulation, product design, and motion graphics.
Below is a detailed recap of recent RNDR development milestones, network metrics and an all new Best of the Metaverse section and Artist Showcase.
Public RNDR Launch
At GTC Digital, RNDR launched with a long term overview of the network roadmap — including planned Arnold Standard Surface support, which will allow RNDR to process GPU-based Arnold rendering jobs, as well as the release of a RNDR SDK that enables creators, artists and developers to build and publish services on RNDR. As discussed in the GTC Digital keynote — with the RNDR SDK, RNDR modules can be authored in GLSL and C++ — all inside Octane just like OSL/Script nodes, and the RNDR Binary linking system will be used to securely publish commercial RNDR modules.
The release was highlighted by the first public use case of RNDR, computer graphics pioneer John Knoll rendering a 4K video for New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, which was processed by over 100 RNDR nodes and completed in a single weekend.
All current OctaneRender artists can now access RNDR with easy to use RNDR Credits offering Paypal and Stripe purchasing processes. The RNDR team has also begun onboarding more miners as the network scales to meet decentralized demand. If you are interested in joining as a miner, please complete the RNDR Interest Form, and you can also reach the team at team@rendertoken.com.
OctaneRender 2020 Release
At GTC Digital, OTOY unveiled OctaneRender 2020 with industry-leading NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing GPU hardware acceleration. With OctaneRender 2020.1, OTOY delivered game changing new features that expand the industry’s first and fastest spectrally correct GPU render engine to meet more production workflows across game, film, design and visualization. The full feature set can be found here and highlights include:
- Fast Spectral Random Walk SSS Skin and Spectral Universal Hair Material — The redesigned skin shader provides instant unbiased, GPU based subsurface scattering. This enables OctaneRender users to create more realistic digital characters, paving the way for ultra-realistic virtual humans that are a key component of next generation immersive media and digital content creation pipelines.
- C4D Native GPU Noises for procedural OSL-based Textures and Effects — The release of C4D procedures natively inside Octanerender is critical for RNDR, as a first step to creating procedurally based effects that reduce intermediary baking steps on the network, paving the way for more frictionless Octane C4D → RNDR workflows.
- LiveDB OSL Procedural Shaders including Autodesk’s 3DSMax shader repository — A redesigned LiveDB features rebuilt Utility Nodes from OTOY Forums easily accessible within LiveDB. With the release of the RNDR SDK, the LiveDB will be ported to the RNDR network enabling developers and artists to license and leverage scripts, modules, plugins and effects in an open ecosystem.
OTOY also previewed OTOY Sculptron and Embergen FX Co-Developed with JangaFX — providing an expanded toolset for real-time GPU based procedurals, volumetrics, simulations, and mesh-based sculpting for OctaneRender users.
Finally, recently OTOY showcased next generation GPU accelerated path tracing with a teaser of Brigade 60-fps real time volumetric path-tracing on NVIDIA RTX cards — an industry first for GPU rendering
OTOY also teased the real-time path-tracing performance gains on the next generation of Ampere GPUs — showcasing the fastest single card OctaneBench score ever recorded of 446.
Octane X
Last week OTOY released the first public preview of Octane X on macOS, which will be available for free for new users on Macs with the release of macOS Big Sur coming this fall. Completely rebuilt from the ground up using Apple’s Metal Graphics API, and fully optimized for performance on AMD Vega and Navi GPUs across the Mac Pro, iMac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro product lines, Octane X for macOS brings the largest creative professional ecosystem to OTOY’s GPU rendering platform, including RNDR.
Octane X is shipping with full support for massively distributed rendering on RNDR — allowing Apple users to scale jobs on decentralized GPUs. You can read the full feature set and additional information on the OTOY forum post.
EmberGenFX and OTOY Sculptron
Just before the Octane X release OTOY and JangaFX announced the first public beta of EmberGenFX — bringing incredible real time GPU simulation tools for fire, volumetrics, smoke and particles to all OctaneRender® subscribers. EmberGenFX and Sculptron complement the expanded OctaneRender 2020 procedural rendering pipeline, offering procedurally-based GPU based mesh sculpting and particle / fluid simulations that bypass intermediate baking processes for real-time, iterative motion graphics workflows and game volumetrics. For RNDR these are important features. Increasing procedurally driven rendering reduces dependencies on baking, file export / import, and plugin effects when massively parallelizing jobs on the network. As a result, OctaneRender users in motion graphics, gaming, and film VFX will have a much easier workflow for rendering volumetric and particle simulations on the decentralized cloud.
As RNDR Founder and CEO said recently, when discussing the long term architecture strategy, “The next step is to get both Sculptron and EmberGenFX stand-alone to be spawned, fed scene and camera data from octane core and then return a cached mesh/volume or Render buffer without passing file.”
Please read the full post here for more details.
RNDR Development Milestones
Improved Artist Interface
To increase usability, the RNDR team redesigned the Artist job submission form based on feedback from Beta Artists. The interface now includes a four-step process, which encourages a user to confirm key information in easy to digest segments prior to spending RNDR Tokens or RNDR Credits. The new interface is designed to reduce mistakes in job submission like incorrect settings that would lead to unusable renders. The job submission prompts include: Render Settings (frame range, samples, resolution), Outputs (with customizable naming conventions, file types, and compression), Network Settings (Tier Priority, Approval Settings and Payment Method), and finally a redesigned Cost Estimate (which displays the costs for a job at different RNDR Tiers, giving users a more robust preview of their cost options).
Enhanced Educational Materials and FAQs
With the Public RNDR launch, the team released a RNDR Helpdesk with guides on using RNDR and FAQs for common questions. RNDR also released the first of a coming series of professional tutorials, with leading 3D artists guiding users through efficiently using the network in production environments. The first tutorial was created by 3D artist Andrey Lebrov walking Cinema4D and Houdini users through creating animations with Particles, Attributes & Dynamics — critical in motion graphics workflows.
RNDR Network Token Metrics
As part of increasing educational materials available for RNDR, the RNDR team released a comprehensive summary of RNDR Token Network Crypto Economic information like token supply, allocation, burn schedule, purchasing plans, and contract information. Please read the blog for more.
RNDR Token Network Statistics
Below is a brief summary of Network statistics for June, a period in which we saw accelerated use of the network and released Tier 2 and Tier 3 rendering, providing the most competitive GPU cloud rendering services for artists around the world.
- Frames rendered: 124,083
- Outputs Created: 290,404
- Amount of RNDR earned: 33,478.75 (Tier 2 released in period)
- Available OctaneBench (OB) on network: 99,729.42
RNDR Reddit AMA With Founder Jules Urbach
At the end of June, RNDR hosted a comprehensive Reddit AMA with RNDR CEO and Founder Jules Urbach, focused on topics like the RNDR roadmap and vision as well as near term priorities for the next phase of the RNDR launch. You can read the full AMA as well as a blog post about the AMA with the Top Five Takeaways for the next chapter of the network’s evolution.
RNDR Artist Showcase
Nick DenBoer and deadmau5, major OctaneRender artists , just created their first “all CG” music video ‘Pomegranate’ using OctaneRender — with scenes processed on over 300 GPUs on RNDR.
deadmau5 and Joel also shared a behind the scenes production discussion between breaking down the process for producing the video. It’s a great conversation to see two amazing artists discuss their craft, and ten minutes in, Nick discusses using OctaneRender and RNDR to create a full CG video without a render farm — saying, “five years ago this would not be possible.”
Carlos Marcial created a series of NFT’s using RNDR that were inspired by indigenous Otomi and Aztec art, and which leveraged AI image generation. You can learn more about Carlos’s work on Twitter and Instagram.
Nejc Kilar — created a serene animation of a minimalist dining room set to. For those still in quarantine lockdown, this is a much needed relaxing CG escape. You can follow Nejc’s work at www.nejckilar.com
Omegafoxxx— a RNDR power user, created a Black Hole event horizon animation using RNDR. You can follow @Omegafoxx.
Shawn Adams — aka RedParisArts created a powerful tribute to support the Black Lives Matter movement using RNDR.
Best of the Metaverse
Under the radar the past few months, there have been significant technological advances in the immersive media ecosystem that is paving the way for broader mainstream adoption of ultra-high-resolution and holographic production and consumption. Below are some highlights:
Advancements in Blockchain Infrastructure
- Algorand released v2.0 of its blockchain with Layer 1 smart contracts and atomic transfers, while Ethereum moved closer to the much anticipated Ethereum 2.0, which promises to make the blockchain more scalable with efficient proof-of-stake transactions. In tandem both advances pave the way for RNDR to leverage these networks to increase transactional throughput and reduce latency. As more information is released about the RNDR collaboration with Algorand, it will be published on the RNDR Medium channel, so please follow this channel for the latest information.
- RNDR partner Basic Attention Token (BAT) released Sponsored Images on all Brave platforms enabling Brave users to opt-in to sponsored ads and earning RNDR Tokens. As mentioned in the RNDR Reddit AMA, this type of use case will be foundational for immersive media monetization, digital rights management, and data sovereignty.
Next Generation 3D Graphics Advances
Within the immersive media space there were a few exciting announcements we wanted to highlight as foundational for the creation of an open holographic metaverse.
- At GTC, NVIDIA unveiled its next generation compute infrastructure Ampere, with a massive real-time rendering speed-up for games and expanded AI silicon for deep learning. Together, these next-generation architecture advancements will move media further into the frontier of immersive and intelligent interactive content.
- NVIDIA also announced they will be supporting DirectX providing expanded cross-platform support. Expanded interoperability is critical to an open metaverse so the RNDR team is extremely excited about the news as well as Apple’s recent announcement of a Windows API on Metal.
- Facebook showcased a preview of mass-market, lightweight Augmented Reality glasses, showing the potential wearable glasses form factor for post-mobile computing. as well as showcased AI supersampling and other rendering augmentations that will help make ultra high resolution imagery available on thin clients (more here).
- Other reports of semitransparent AR Glasses from Apple also show an increasing interest in mass market AR from leading hardware and technology companies.
Other Metaverse News
- 12K Cameras — On the production front, BlackMagic Design unveiled a mind blowing 12K! camera previewing the next generation of ultra high res live action. With 14 stops of dynamic range and native RAW, surely artists will need massive GPU compute power for compositing VFX — see Corridor Digital’s Wren discuss the camera here. For a window into the future of virtual filmmaking, Alex Stoltz also produced an 8-lesson guide about how storytelling will change in the coming years.
- AI Rachel — the first AI generated Instagram influencer using RTX GPUs and Unreal Engine.
- GPT-3 & Crypto — with the opening up of GPT-3 one emerging application that is exciting for the future of real-time digital rights management, is using AI technology as a block explorer.
- Bitcoin Goes to Space — need we say more..
RNDR Tips and Tricks
Finally, we wanted to share some great resources created by the community for adding to your 3D art skills.
- Octane Skin Shader Tutorial created by Rohan Dalvi helps you leverage the latest Fast Random Walk Spectral Subsurface Scattering pipeline released in OctaneRender 2020 to create ultra-realistic digital characters.
- A guide on how to create stunning texture displacement maps for Blender from OTOY 3D Artist Lino Grandi. It is useful for Blender users but many of the techniques can also be used in other OctaneRender DCC integrations.
- Finally a please see this twitter post for an optimization tip on splitting up renders to increase rendering speeds and reducing render times.
We’re excited to be with you on this next step in the RNDR Network — stay tuned for future updates! We’ll be back soon.
— The RNDR Team
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/
