Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work building new products & features to help creators work more efficiently in this crazy 2020 world. We’ve been pretty quiet about what we’ve been building, and you may have noticed some of the infrastructure upgrades and new features that we've added to your workflows in Concierge Render. We think it’s finally time to unveil them - we hope they make your creative process more efficient and allow you to push the limits of what’s possible even further.
Completely Redesigned Scheduler and Render Manager
The back end of the Concierge Render platform had the largest overhaul. We added powerful tools to support multi-step render processes, to allow more flexibility in your render job parameters, and to provide us with the flexibility to add exciting new features more quickly. One of the biggest changes is the introduction of “Analysis” when you upload a file. When a new file is detected, we automatically kick off a process to analyze that file, identify any issues (like missing linked assets, corrupt files, etc), and pre-populate the render forms with scene information (like start/stop frames, resolution, samples). It’s our hope that these back-end updates will save you time and avoid headaches in your creative process.
A Brand New, Custom-Built File Uploader
With the move to work from home happening so quickly, we heard countless complaints about uploading files, most of them went “My home internet is so bad...please help!” You talked, you yelled, you cried...we listened. We built and rolled out a completely new tool to upload your assets to Concierge. It was built so that when you make small changes to your files locally, the Concierge system recognizes only those tiny changes so you only have to re-upload the parts that ACTUALLY changed. No more need to upload an entire 10GB scene ALL OVER AGAIN when only a small setting changed. We also built the uploader so that if your WiFi goes out, or you lose power (hey, it’s 2020…), your files will resume uploading right where they left off.
“Choose Your Own” Hardware Selector
We know that not all jobs are created equal, nor do they require the same hardware. We’ve heard from a lot of you that you want the flexibility to choose your hardware. We’ve delivered a new set of options in the render form that allow you to choose between CPU and GPU rendering, as well as a number of different server types for each selection. You’ll find the newest NVIDIA hardware available, including NVIDIA V100 and Quadro RTX series GPUs. Need your jobs to run faster? Run your job with multiple, high-end GPUs per frame. Need to save money? Run each frame on 1 GPU.
Blender Cycles OptiX Accelerated Rendering
With the addition of new NVIDIA Quadro RTX series hardware, we’ve introduced access to the hardware-accelerated Cycles OptiX render engine in Blender. This is an experimental feature in Blender and doesn’t support Ambient Occlusion and Bevel Shader Nodes. For some jobs, it can provide a much shorter render time and an all-around lower cost. We encourage you to give it a try!
CoreWeave’s NVIDIA Partnership
In late August, we joined the NVIDIA Cloud Service Provider program as a Preferred Partner. This partnership with NVIDIA demonstrates our commitment to provide the most cutting edge creative and visualization solutions for the CGI and VFX industries. Over the coming months, we’ll be talking more about how this is changing the shape of our offerings and allowing us to bring awesome new technology to your design and rendering pipeline.
Refreshed user interface and render dashboard
We refreshed the Concierge Render dashboard and render interface as we added additional render options. It was a small change, but we think it’s cleaner and more intuitive now. We hope you agree.
Head over to Concierge Render to check out these updates on your next project.
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