Renderfarm.fi – A collective rendering platform

Description:

Renderfarm.fi is the most accessible distributed rendering platform on the Internet. It is – and always will be – a completely free service that enables its users to render their animations or stills by using the computing power of volunteers from around the world. Renderfarm.fi encourages everybody to take part in both the online community and the collaborative rendering. We also advocate open licensing (Creative Commons), open values and sharing of resources over geographic borders.

Renderfarm.fi enables its users to participate in the rendering of stills and animations, regardless of whether or not they themselves are able to or even interested in learning about 3D modeling and animation. The stills and animations created can then later become parts of a movie that the users have helped to create.

Activities:

The aim is to present the technology of Renderfarm.fi thus the idea of volunteer computing and Desktop Grids via the Big Buck Bunny animation video. Computer animated films are wide-spread and an interesting field for pupils at every age. Rendering is a process where specialized computer software is used to generate images out of a 3D model, which is very computationally intensive. Distributed rendering is needed to accelerate this process, which involves using multiple computers. To make it more cost effective Renderfarm.fi enables to join personal computers together to create one very powerful renderfarm. Since volunteering is getting more and more common, pupils can take part in that as well by joining the volunteer computing community, where they can ear prizes.

Locally set-up desktop grids can enable schools to have their own renderfarms, thus their own animated videos. Creating videos enable the collaborative competition amongst pupils. For more information, visit Renderfarm.fi http://www.renderfarm.fi/.

With the 3D editor Blender Cookie (http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/getting-started/) 3D objects can be created and then these can be uploaded to Renderfarm and you can observe how the objects are rendered in real time making use of volunteer computing. This is an example of how make a bunch of balloons: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/11/04/creating-a-bunch-of-balloons/