OTOY, The Render Network Foundation, and The Blender Foundation Release Collaboration to Integrate Cycles on The Render Network with Free Access for All Blender Users

At BCON LA, OTOY and The Render Network announce a new Render Network Proposal (RNP) to bring Blender’s Cycles to the network, with free access to over 2-million Blender users worldwide

LOS ANGELES, CA – April 5th, 2024

Today, OTOY, The Blender Foundation, and the Render Network Foundation released a new collaboration to bring Blender’s native GPU raytracing engine, Cycles, to the Render Network as part of a new Render Network Proposal RNP-014 in the network’s decentralized governance.

Founder and CEO of OTOY and Founder of The Render Network, Jules Urbach, accompanied the release with a keynote presentation at Blender’s BCON LA ‘The Future of Rendering’ discussing the collaboration alongside emerging technologies in spatial media, generative AI, immersive displays, and decentralized computing.

According to Render Network Proposal RNP-014 authored by members of the Render Network, Dino Muhic and Steven Scott, the goal of the integration is to provide over 2-million Blender users with seamless access to the powerful and scalable rendering resources offered by the Render Network.

As part of the integration, The Render Foundation will be providing all free Octane Prime tier license users access to the Render Network, with no additional subscription fees, enabling them to access near unlimited high performance on-demand GPU rendering power without any upfront costs.

With shared missions to democratize 3D graphics using open technologies and platforms, the collaboration is a milestone advance in the 3D industry, empowering artists to realize their most ambitious creative visions with fewer barriers to entry. By leveraging the combination of free production quality rendering software and open, permissionless access to massively scalable and affordable on-demand decentralized GPU cloud compute, artists around the world can access tools previously only available to the most powerful Hollywood studios.

The release is the next step in a collaboration between OTOY, The Blender Foundation, and The Render Network Foundation that began last year with the OTOY supporting the Blender Development Fund joining Corporate Patrons like AMD, Amazon, Epic Games and Volkswagen to fund Blender’s open source development efforts.

The integration of Blender’s Cycles on the Render Network continues the expansion of the network into an open platform supporting a wider range of toolsets and workflows across the 3D industry, including: native support of Cinema 4D files, support for additional render engines like Redshift and Arnold, and integration with game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity3D.

In addition to access near unlimited decentralized GPU computing power and toolsets for blockchain provenance using compressed NFTs, OTOY and Blender are working on optimizing Blender’s scene graph using Hydra Render delegates, enabling artists to leverage the benefits of multiple render engines in one frictionless on-chain workflow.

According to Founder and CEO of OTOY, Jules Urbach, “We’ve been working on integrating Blender with other pipelines and tools used in production, such as Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine. We’re building tools that can take Blender’s scene graph and run it through another process, enabling live linking with super-fast performance. This allows seamless collaboration between Blender and other software in the artistic and asset creation workflow.

Urbach added, “The Hydra render delegate system in Blender 4 is a key piece of technology enabling integration. We have an OctaneRender delegate ready, and within Octane itself, we can load other render delegates. This allows us to combine renderers like OctaneRender and Cycles, taking their respective outputs and compositing them together seamlessly within a single scene. The ability to leverage multiple render engines in this way opens up new creative possibilities.”

RNP-014 is currently available for community discussion at the Render Network Foundation’s Discord channel for the RNP, where governance decisions are open for debate and feedback. Artists looking to leverage the integration can subscribe for free to the Octane Prime tier with support for Blender. Free access to the Render Network would be added to the Render Foundation roadmap if approved by the Render Network community in RNP-014.

For a comprehensive set of resources about the using Blender in Octane and on the Render Network please see here.

About The Render Network Foundation

The Render Network Foundation is the governance organization for the world’s leading decentralized compute network, the Render Network. The network connects node operators looking to monetize their idle GPU compute power with artists looking to scale intensive 3D-rendering work and with machine learning developers looking to train and tune AI models. Through a decentralized peer-to-peer network, the Render Network achieves unprecedented levels of scale, speed, and economic efficiency. For more information on Render Network Foundation, please visit https://renderfoundation.com.

About OTOY Inc.

OTOY Inc. is the definitive cloud graphics company, pioneering technology that is redefining content creation and delivery for media and entertainment organizations around the world. OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers, providing unprecedented creative freedom, new levels of realism, and new economics in content creation and distribution powered by the cloud. For more information, visit www.otoy.com.

Additional Resources:

• Read more about The Render Network here.

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