EdgeCloud: New 3D Rendering Jobs Leveraging Blender Technology

We’re excited to announce the launch of new 3D rendering jobs for Theta edge nodes on the Windows platform. These new rendering jobs leverage Blender, the most popular open-source 3D modeling and animation technology in the world, with over 14 million downloads in 2020 alone and growing rapidly. The mission of the Blender Foundation, an independent public benefit organization, is to empower anyone to create 3D computer generated CG content, with free access to technical and creative production resources.

As part of today’s Windows software update to Edge Node v4.6.2, it will automatically download and install the latest Windows Blender binary to facilitate the entire 3D development pipeline from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. Here’s a showcase and a few Blender project examples.

Theta’s decentralized edge network will support any (.blend) file for rendering complex characters, scenes and animation with full CUDA support on Windows OS, and later Metal support for GPU acceleration on macOS and support for Linux OS. The output can be images or video as varied stitched frames. Here are some examples of .blend files and one of Theta team’s favorites, Big Buck Bunny short film, was entirely created with Blender.

Big Buck Bunny 60fps 4K — Official Blender Foundation Short Film

Big budget Hollywood animated CGI movies such as How to Train Your Dragon 2 required over 90 million render hours to render the 129,600 frames in the final film. If one computer had worked on the rendering task, it would have taken 10,273 years to complete. Theta’s network of over 25,000 globally distributed edge nodes effectively enable the creation of a large render farm, splitting the job into parallel shards where a node can render an arbitrary number of frames, process and stitch them together after the fact. This vastly improves parallelism and can significantly increase the performance of a large rendering task.

With this release, Theta EdgeCloud is one step closer to pioneering the first hybrid cloud-edge computing platform for 3D rendering and with Blender’s widespread adoption could fundamentally transform a number of industries from entertainment to retail, education, architecture and engineering.

1. Entertainment and Gaming — game developers and animation studios utilize rendering technology for creating 3D assets, characters, and environments, while film production houses use them for pre-visualization, animatics, and visual effects.
2. Retail and Advertising — retail companies use 3D rendering for product visualization to create realistic 3D models, packaging design, and advertising campaigns.
3. Education and Training — educational institutions incorporate into their curriculum for teaching 3D modeling, animation, and visual effects.
4. Architecture and Interior Design — architects and interior designers employ rendering to create 3D models of buildings, interiors, landscapes, and to aid in visualizing designs and presenting to clients.
5. Engineering and Manufacturing — engineers use 3D rendering technology for prototyping, product design, and simulations, while manufacturing companies use the technology for visualization features for product presentations and marketing materials.

We hope you‘ll join us in experimenting with these new 3D rendering jobs on your Theta edge node, or if you aren’t running an edge node you can download the software here to get started!