RNDR Launch and GTC Digital Recap
The RNDR team is thrilled to reach the next stage of the network’s evolution with the first public launch of RNDR. As part of the release of OctaneRender 2020.1, the RNDR network is now available for all current OctaneRender subscribers and box license holders at rndr.otoy.com, running on Octane 2020.1 — which features 2–3x NVIDIA RTX GPU ray-tracing hardware acceleration and a powerful set of new production-ready tools for the industry’s first and fastest GPU accelerated spectrally-correct renderer.
This blog post will review the RNDR Launch recap announcements from GTC Digital, bringing together the major news around RNDR and OctaneRender 2020. The next set of updates will focus on upcoming releases, artist showcases, and a recap of recent talks and announcements— including RNDR Founder Jules Urbach discussing OTOY’s roadmap on the Mograph Podcast.
RNDR Launched
The RNDR launch was initially previewed in a GTC Digital talk, highlighted by the first production use of RNDR — graphics pioneer John Knoll using RNDR to scale a 4K animation for New York City’s Hayden’s planetarium to hundreds of GPU Nodes on the RNDR network.
As part of the release, the network introduced RNDR Credits, an easy artist friendly way to purchase rendering power on the network using PayPal or Stripe. To give RNDR a try, current OctaneRender subscribers and box license holders can sign in at rndr.otoy.com using your OTOY account and you will be able to experience the RNDR revolution for yourself. If you haven’t upgraded your license recently, now is the time to either subscribe, purchase or upgrade — and you will get access to the entire OctaneRender ecosystem, including the latest OctaneRender 2020 advances, and access to RNDR.
To learn more information about using RNDR , please see our FAQs and Guides — and for C4D users, please see this guide prepared by Andrey Lebrov with an in-depth look at how to use the network within C4D workflows.
During the release, RNDR also announced an Enterprise Tier with multi-cloud integrations for Microsoft Azure and other public cloud providers, giving artists access to studio-ready nodes with TPN security — all at affordable prices, and with overflow capacity on the RNDR Network.
For those looking to sign up as Miners on the network — please fill out the RNDR Interest Form with your information and details about the machine(s) you would like to register on the network. You will be added to the Miner waitlist and onboarded as the network scales and based on your node’s information. Please see our FAQ for more details like hardware requirements.
For general info, feel free to check out our instructional materials and keep your eyes out for new tutorials coming out in future posts.
GTC Digital OctaneRender 2020 Release Recap
At this year’s virtual NVIDIA GTC 2020 conference, Jules Urbach gave his yearly presentation titled “The Future of GPU Rendering”. Delving deep into the future of the OctaneRender, the RNDR platform, and new partnerships — it was a talk not to be missed!
On April 28th, RNDR publicly launched with two new user tiers: Enterprise tier (releasing shortly) and Public tier for fast, low cost distributed rendering. The Enterprise tier is aimed at studios looking for studio-ready TPN (Trusted Partner Network) nodes with powerful specs like 8xV100 GPUs and NV Link pooled memory. The Enterprise tier will soon replace ORC as the OctaneRender centralized cloud rendering solution, while the Public tier features near unlimited scaling on peer-to-peer nodes at fractions of the cost and with end-to-end encryption.
One of the biggest takeaways from the presentation was OTOY’s laser focus on the RNDR API and SDK as the future portable graphics, AI and compute framework for both internal and external development of software apps and modules on the RNDR network. All OTOY software and services, from the upcoming Octane X onwards, will be built using the RNDR SDK. The Metal API will be fully featured in the upcoming release and have pixel parity with the CUDA version. Of equal importance, third-party creators, artists and developers can build and publish services with the RNDR SDK, enabling new extensions to be offered by anyone through the RNDR blockchain.
When RNDR was first launched in 2017, it was designed and built around OctaneRender and OctaneBench. However, since the moment of its conception, the original aspiration was always towards building a larger ecosystem consisting of a panoply of services and modules outside of OTOY’s own software. As a harbinger of this future, at GTC Jules announced the integration of Autodesk Arnold renderer and Microsoft Azure into RNDR! OTOY has had a decade-long working relationship with Autodesk developing cloud rendering workflows, and initially proposed increasing interoperability bringing Arnold onto RNDR two years ago when the service was announced.
OTOY and Autodesk are collaborating on making the physically-based Standard Surface shader work between Octane and Arnold by integrating Standard Surface as a core node in Octane. Thus, interchange between OTOY’s ecosystem and Arnold will work through a single scene system to launch jobs for Octane, Arnold, the real-time Brigade path-tracing engine, and so on. OTOY is making Standard Surface a core node in Octane. This is a template for other renderers joining RNDR down the line. Combined with the Pixar Hydra imaging framework API called Render Delegates that connects multiple renderer front-ends and backends, customers will be able to mix or plug third-party renderers in and have them working all Hydra Applications. This also means that if they are developing their Hydra Render Delegate in the RNDR API, they can cross-compile to Metal targeting Intel integrated chips on laptops, MacBooks, iPads and phones.
OTOY’s real-time path tracing kernel Brigade has been completely built in the RNDR SDK. The equivalent rendering power of what took 80 GPUs in 2015 to reach 3000 OctaneBench can now be accomplished with a single NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti card. The more RT cores NVIDIA can support in the future, the faster Brigade will be able to run. Last year, Brigade featured simple, noise-free Ambient Occlusion at 60 fps. In the 2020 version of Brigade, full noise-free path tracing on RTX has been achieved from calculating only 4 samples per pixel. This is thanks to a completely rebuilt kernel and a simplified material system. The scenes are fully path traced, not using any rasterization. Volumetrics and caustics are real-time, godrays are running at game engine speeds on a single 2080. A really cool feature in the new Brigade is a connection to the Progressive Photon Mapping (PPM) kernel output that provides irradiance cache baking. Artists will be able to run Octane in the background to bake Global Illumination and caustics to feed that into Brigade for hybrid rendering.
The upcoming 2020.2 release that is coming out this summer will feature delta sync to RNDR in all the 26+ DCC toolchains. You will not have to upload a whole new ORBX scene file every time you make a small change, but can work directly from the DCC tool to upload only parts of the scene. Another improvement being explored is ORBX export for Cinema 4D, which would allow us to put C4D files into ORBX packages. The idea is to jam in more procedurals and make the export process smarter, which will help reduce the size and complexity of uploading to the RNDR network.
Just beyond the horizon, modules built on top of the RNDR SDK will greatly expand the utility and reach of the entire RNDR ecosystem. For the very first third-party tool integration, OTOY is partnering with the company JangaFX to bring their real-time physics system EmberGen FX into RNDR Module platform. EmberGen FX will provide users with interactive volumetric simulation tools that work seamlessly with Octane, Brigade and Sculptron, plus any other DCC tools that run with the RNDR API, such as Arnold, Blender, Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine 4. The standalone version of EmberGen FX — now in beta — will be available to all Octane users this summer, with extra features made available for an additional subscription.
Best of the Metaverse
In the next post, we will be including a larger Best of the Metaverse and Artist showcase sections so if you have works created on RNDR that you would like to include in the next post, please email team@rendertoken.com.
- Staying Productive at Home — In this series produced by NVIDIA, OTOY 3D Artist Lino Grandi shares tips on staying productive in quarantine with other 3D experts and OctaneRender users.
- Is the Metaverse Here Yet? — It’s not exactly how we imagined in Ready Player One, you might not even notice it, but in quarantine we are all living in a nascent metaverse of sorts. Techcrunch takes us through a tour of the emerging virtual collaboration and communications technologies keeping us connected amidst COVID 19 — and what they portend for the future of AR / VR and immersive media. Also if you didn’t catch it, Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert had all the makings of the metaverse that await us as real time graphics and immersive technologies mature.
- The X-Prize Pandemic Alliance — For the moment humanity’s greatest challenges have now moved from the grand expanse of interplanetary space travel and fully autonomous AI technologies to understanding the inner workings of a microscopic viruses. X-Prize has recently announced its latest challenge to fight COVID 19 — bringing together leading academic, medical, and technology companies to collaborate on tackling the greatest challenge facing our generation. We’ve already seen peer-to-peer computing and advanced rendering help with tasks like essential protein folding simulations — and are excited to see what horizons we can achieve when we collectively put our minds and resources together.
- Beeple vs. COVID 19 — from Tom Hanks to the Tiger King and Murder Hornet’s, Beeple’s #EVERYDAYS have kept us entertained and maybe just a bit less stir crazy during quarantine. Thank you!
Stay tuned for upcoming posts and announcements, and for support questions about using RNDR, please contact the team at support@rendertoken.com.
For general questions please reach out to team@rendertoken.com .
— The RNDR Team
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