RNDR 2020 March Update and GTC Digital Preview

With RNDR beginning a transition out of Beta, we are excited to recap some of the latest advances in the project, showcase some of the amazing work that is being created on RNDR, and look to the next phase of the network.

Usability Improvements Based on Beta Feedback

The RNDR Beta community has been invaluable in helping us refine the network. Below is a recap of some of the new development additions and UI improvements we’ve made based on feedback from our Beta community.

• When looking at Scenes, “Previous Renders” are now listed, allowing for easier workflow management and a simplified job re-submission process.
• A contingency pop-up has been included when Re-Rendering Frames in bulk. Artists will now have to confirm that they would like to re-render all of the selected frames, removing the possibility of losing RNDR on accidentally re-rendering frames.
• Outputs can now be named more easily, including with non-alphanumeric characters such as “-”.
• Preset Resolution options have been included in Job configuration. Users can now choose from options such as “PAL”, “HD”, “UHD 4K”, or set the resolution range as done previously.
• API created jobs can now be accepted by the RNDR network.
• “Speed” and “Power” bars have been introduced in order to help users visualize the projected ability of their RNDRing at individual price points
• Tier 3 Pricing has been introduced as an option for Rendering, providing the most economic rendering service available on the network.
• Tier 3 is designed to provide the most affordable rendering, but comes at the cost of both power and speed.

Features In Development — (stay tuned for our April Update for more info)

• Zipped outputs enabling artists to easily manage batch downloads and reduce bandwidth.
• Job Tier for RNDR API created jobs, enabling rapid batch customizeable job submission pipeline
• Enterprise Tier — details forthcoming in April update

Statistics — since the last end end of year reddit Beta update:

• Frames rendered: 87,801
• Outputs Created: 191,712
• Max Resolution Tested: 12,000 x 12,000
• Amount of RNDR earned: 37,101
• Available OctaneBench (OB) on network: 83,298

Art Powered By RNDR

From the project’s inception, the vision for RNDR is to democratize high performance GPU rendering, removing production bottlenecks and empowering artists to realize their most ambitious creative visions. We’ve been lucky enough to have a great community of artists join our Beta, and through their passion for the project we’ve been able to build a robust platform that we hope will revolutionize the rendering world. Throughout the Beta period, we’ve been astounded at the work that the RNDR community has created and wanted to share some highlights.

Dino Muhic

Andrey Lebrov

Gilles Augustijnen

Geoff Holman / Zargon Studios

James Hibbert

Best of the Metaverse

The metaverse has been our solace in challenging quarantine times — so we have a lot to share for this edition of ‘best of the metaverse’. In the background of COVID-19, there has been quite a bit of news in the graphics industry that we’ve collected. Hopefully, it provides a welcome look at the future of media, some of the inspiring artists helping us get through the crisis, and the exciting days ahead when we recover from the virus.

A New Marvel Superpower: Rendering

For all fans of the Marvel Universe and rendering, your worlds may be colliding soon! Jules Urbach, CEO and Founder of OTOY and the creative mind behind RNDR, will be touching down in the Marvel comics universe this May with the release of Kurt Busiek, Yildiray Cinar and Alex Ross’ The Marvels #1. For all information on the series, check out Marvel’s official announcement for more.

Hum3D Space Rover Challenge

The RNDR team and OTOY are proud to announce they are sponsoring Hum3D’s Space Rover art contest — where you can render visions of an interplanetary future! Submissions are being accepted March 18th — June 3rd, and 1st-3rd prize winners will be gifted an Octane Enterprise all access license, along with 500 Render Token (RNDR) Credits. For additional contest details, please see the Hum3D contest page, and good luck to all participants!

Fighting a virus with viral computing: p2p RNDR miners vs. COVID-19

In an effort to help the global fight against COVID-19, ETH miners, and even members of the RNDR team have contributed their computing power to Stanford University’s Folding@home project to process protein folding simulations. This work has the potential to help researchers better understand the behavior of the virus — an important step for immunologists to develop novel therapeutics. This work can only be done with massive amounts of high performance parallel computing, and to date the distributed computing model has achieved nearly an order of magnitude increase in compute power over the world’s fastest supercomputer — see this Tom’s Hardware article on the 7x scale advantage of Folding@home. We were especially proud to see RNDR Beta Miner Partners like Colossus Processing contribute their compute power to Folding@home — way to go! In response to this destructive epidemic, we hope that new modes of collaboration and resource sharing like p2p HPC computing rise up to meet the emerging challenges the world faces.

Quarantin3D: The First Global 3D Graphics Conference Born in Pandemic Quarantine

We were thrilled to see OctaneRender artist Xavier Boldtron Cardona, in the midst of a quarantine in Spain, hearing of other user’s experience in countries like Italy, organize Quarantin3D — a virtual 3D forum for artists to connect and share their knowledge while we fight COVID-19. The first edition of Quarantin3D took place Saturday 3/21 featuring a truly amazing group of artists. There will be a follow up event 3/28 on Twitch. Now is the time to learn 3D or polish your skills.

BTW: if you have some free time working from home and want to learn 3D, a good place to start would be with Beeple’s C4D project files that he generously made available for people to hone their everyday skills while sheltering from the virus. You can also use OctaneRender for free in Unity, UE4 and Blender.

The Next Generation of Virtual Connectivity

Depending on where you are, you may be sheltering in place to bend the curve of COVID-19 transmission. Social distancing has only highlighted the need to stay connected, and new digital tools are again in the spotlight for their power to bring us together, virtually. With the Coronavirus forcing large swaths of the global workforce online, Danny Chrichton and Eric Peckham of Techcrunch take a look at the potential for virtual landscapes and a larger scale metaverse in a world craving for human interaction. We’ve also seen the way that virtual reality can help visualize an exponentially growing pandemic. For more information on how OTOY and RNDR are building a shared globally connected immersive digital space, check out Jules’ take on what the Metaverse really means.

AI Goes Back to the Future: Graphics legend, and creator of Doom, Jon Carmack recently shared a snippet of his new AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) research. The approach is revolutionary, training on TV, video games, and virtual chat rooms — like a kid growing up the metaverse. He’s starting with Sega’s Master System, the 8-bit console released in 1985.

Pixar CGI Pioneers Win Turing Award: Pixar’s Ed Catmull and Patrick Hanrahan win The Turing Award the most prestigious award in computer graphics — with recent winners like Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, cryptographer Martin Hellman, and the AI pioneers behind innovative approaches like neural networks. You can see the first 3D scene ever that they created here. The Turing awards recent history could be seen as encompassing some of the most fundamental building blocks of the open metaverse: immersive graphics, secure decentralized computing protocols, open global hypermedia read/write networks, and computer augmented intelligence.

The iPad Pro Gets Lidar: One of the exciting features released in the next generation iPad is a lidar scanner for AR Kit 3.5. Better object occlusion, plane detection, and scene geometry make it much easier to blend ultra-realistic 3D rendered objects into AR iPad experiences.

Game Consoles Preview Raytracing: The Playstation 5 and XBox Series X both announced that they will be leveraging AMD raytracing GPU’s, bringing cinematic real-time graphics to console gaming experiences. This is just the fisrt wave of console based raytracing, and a big step in blending cinematic and interactive real time graphics.

CES 2020: Who would have imagined that CES was the last major in-person media industry event, but thankfully RNDR’s own Janne Saviranta captured all the exciting news from this year’s conference in an epic three part reddit series. Below is a recap, and click the links for more details about the exciting new technologies poised to transform media in the 2020’s and beyond:

• Part 1 — Virtual reality saw some evolutionary, if not revolutionary, steps towards a higher field of view, more tracking of body features in a wider range of conditions and smaller, more well-balanced headsets:
• Part 2 — Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables. See the latest advancements in augmented and mixed reality
• Part 3 — Holography is back in the spotlight. The decades-long holy grail “technology of the future” is finally starting to make real, concrete steps towards ubiquity in the 2020s. Light fields are a key technology to make this happen through the accurate modeling of the way that light from the real world interacts with the human eye.

In April, we will release a GTC Digital recap, which will include details about RNDR Phase IV as well as some recent major project milestones — all of which we will be sharing at upcoming GTC Digital presentations.

Stay tuned, stay safe!

— The RNDR Team

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