GarageFarm.NET News

[Greenlaw]

Hey Steve! Great to hear from you and thanks for the info. Will definitely give GarageFarm a trial run soon.

Lately I've been able to work on personal projects again. Thanks to the pandemic, no more commuting and OT means I have more 'me' time. (Silver linings!)

[devin]

Used GF on three back-to-back projects recently and it was rock solid. They're also super responsive, not that I had any technical issues. At my own fault, I was too quick to archive scenes.

[Pete_GF]

Hi guys!

Pete here from GarageFarm.NET.

The year 2020 is coming to an end, and it was a hard year for sure. We decided to make lemonade from a rainfall of lemons and focused on our dust-covered ‘future features’ list and added as many of them to the farm as we could.

o here are some updates from GarageFarm.NET that will make using our service easier and give you new tools to render the scenes exactly as you want .


1. New farm features and hardware:

- We increased node limits for priorities, so you get more rendering power for the same price:

High priority - 300 nodes per job
Medium priority - 150 nodes per job
Low priority - 100 nodes for all jobs on Low.

- We added more CPU nodes, and they are various models so in general, we offer 20K rendering cores.
- We added a 512 GB RAM node. There is only one now because it rarely happens today that the scenes need more than 256GB (which is our upper limit in general). But in case your scene doesn’t fit even in 256GB we can render it on 512GB.


2. Lightwave rendering and plugin updates:

New features:
- We added support for Lightwave 2020.0.2+ versions.
- We added render progress for Lightwave + Kray.

Fixes:
- We fixed an issue with outputs paths.
- We fixed an issue with alembic file incorrectly linked in MD Reader modifier, radiosity cache link, MDD assets links and not relinked GI files.
- We fixed an issue with missing user output in our settings file & renderBeamer download to user output procedure.


3. renderBeamer updates (our uploader\downloader tool)

- We added option to use download directory selected in the scene. To use the new feature we have added “use scene download path” switch in renderBeamer settings. That option makes beamer more production-friendly so you can download the renders from a particular scene into that scene’s directory – the same as most artists do when rendering locally.
- We added Korean language support.
- We expanded our ‘auto-submit’ feature. (it allows you to add many jobs to the queue without using the submit window). We added “add as paused” option, custom script support, and option to edit default auto-submit template.
- We added download progress info for downloading our plugins.
- We added an option to launch renderBeamer on every system startup (Windows, Mac), and an option to choose action on renderBeamer window close (minimize to tray or close application.)
- We added plugin temp directory defined in beamer settings.
- We added drag selection for upload, download, log entries (select an entry and drag the mouse to select multiple.)
- We added downloads sorting by column, date column in downloads and a button (folder icon) to open downloads directories.
- We expanded our ‘auto-submit’ feature (it allows to add many jobs to the queue without using the submit window). We added "add as paused" option, custom script support, and option to edit default auto-submit template.
Here is a video explaining the auto-submit feature (It’s from May, but the general functionality didn’t change.)


4. Web Manager (jobs management web dashboard):

- We added image preview for EXR, CXR and FXR. Also, EXRs are now converted to JPGs on the fly and correctly displayed for faster preview.



- We improved farm queue info, now we show whole farm queue, as well as queue before your highest job and the queue before the selected job.
- We added “show progress” function in jobs panel. Now, you can easily open the real-time progress panel by just selecting a job. When using “show progress” option, the panel will open automatically, even if it’s closed.
- We added high RAM usage notification, you can also get it as email notification if you set it in your account’s profile in “receive render status e-mail notifications.”
- We added multiple emails notifications – if you coworkers need to get the notifications as well, you can add more notification emails to your account profile.
- We added a cool new feature to Web Manager - video sequence creation.

To create video sequence from rendered frames, just browse to "Renders" folder in Web Manager file browser panel and use “Create video sequence” under RMB.
Next, just set desired video options like format, codec, bitrate and so on, and submit video sequence job to render. Once it’s done, just download video job from renderBeamer.



Some new features we added to video creation recently:
- FFmpeg framerate now supports fractions, added pixel format setting, different formats are available for each encoder
- We added profiles for DNxHD and h265 encoders, HAP encoder and profiles, mxf, changed h264 and h265 encoders to not use quicksync, added AV1 encoder requiring experimental flag

If you haven’t checked us yet you can register with $50 free test credits HERE

If you have any questions or in doubt, I will be happy to answer them here. You can also use live Web-chat on our website, where you will get an immediate response. We are online 24/7.

Thank you for the positive feedback guys. So you are only one click away from trying us out anytime you find it convenient.

Happy rendering and good new 2021 year guys!

Pete

[erikals]

Great info!

wondering, not crucial, but does the farm support the plugins ? >

Advanced Placement
3rdPowers CageDeformer
Turbulence

[fishhead]

and crucial for consideration (at least for me):
erxTrader Pro (because of Cryptomatte feature)

[erikals]

a link to plugins here, bottom,
https://garagefarm.net/lightwave-render-farm

but broken link