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BURP Distributed Rendering Project Enters Alpha

22
By on 3D News

The BURP project aims to provide a publicly accessible distributed renderfarm for Blender. It is built upon the BOINC software (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) which is now also used for projects such as Seti@Home.

If you're running Windows or Linux you can download their client and join the Net. So far there's still no OSX BURP client so I can't join in the fun, unfortunately. (BOINC itself does support OSX, so if you want you can experiment with other projects).
As they're still in alpha, certain restrictions apply:

  • Sessions will either be queued for rendering or rejected within 48 hours with at least 90% certainty
  • Downtime will be announced and scheduled (however, accidental unscheduled downtime may happen from time to time)
  • The system will pick out at most one session to render every hour

So, you can submit jobs but there's no guarantee that they will be rendered.

I've been keeping an eye on this project and I'm really hoping they'll make good progress in the near future. Being able to offer access to such a free renderfarm would be an awesome feature for Blender!

I do have a critical remark though: In the light of the recent discussion on Blender security, I do wonder how vulnerable this system is to attack. How easy is it to upload a .blend with an evil Python script?

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

22 Comments

  3. elbeem on

    "I do have a critical remark though: In the light of the recent discussion on Blender security, I do wonder how vulnerable this system is to attack. How easy is it to upload a .blend with an evil Python script?"

    Is it possible to add an option within the Blender GUI to upload the project to BURP as an spesial filetype that does not include any scripts, or somehing?

    Reply
  7. Javawocky on

    Here is a simple set of rules for BURP:
    If you are Pixar, don't use BURP, unless you want to produce the second open source movie
    If you are doing commercial work, don't use BURP - use Respower or some other excellent online renderer for a small fee.
    If you don't want others to steel your cool model of the ginger bread man, Don't use BURP.

    If you are doing something cool and don't mind that other people can grab your blend file, use BURP
    If you have something to render and you want to crank every setting to the max and want to see it before you die, use BURP
    If you want to have lots of chicks, use BURP. Well not to sure about that last point.

    Point is this: Where else can you get hundreds of computers to render you 'masterpiece' for free? And if you really have a true 'masterpiece' which you plan to profit off, you probably have a little cash to use a commercial render farm.

    Do plug you computer into BURP to help rendering though, if you are not paranoid about security and work at a bank.

    Reply
  8. S-T-S on

    I'm left wondering if there is actually any need for python scripts in projects that are rendered with BURP. I can't think of any use for python for rendering stage only (please enlighten me)

    I asked the same question in BURP forums and Janus (main developer of BURP) was kind enough to answer. I think that there is quite good protection against malicious users at the moment and it is only getting better as the system matures.

    Read the BURP thread here: http://burp.boinc.dk/forum_thread.php?id=775#5653

    Reply
  10. Joeri on

    "I'm left wondering if there is actually any need for python scripts in projects"
    Sometimes python is used to position an object or to alter layers or to move verteces or to... (endless list)
    It might be a good idea to add a security entry in the user settings with a toggle button: "Python off" (in blender and in BURP)
    Most scenes will be shiny balls on checkerboards anyway, seeing that there is no way to secure your file from being used by others.

    "I think that there is quite good protection against malicious users at the moment "
    Restricting access to the filesystem is a good idea. But python scripts can write python scripts, there is no way to have software detect if this creates malicious scripts. It can even write randomly evil scripts, making it total possible not to be detected by BURP administrators.

    "All sessions with obfuscated/unneeded/unclear python scripts are rejected"...
    Good idea,...

    Reply
  11. elbeem on

    Joeri wrote: "Sometimes python is used to position an object or to alter layers or to move verteces or to… (endless list)"

    But after that is done, you don't need Python for the rendering, do you? There is no need to allow python scripts running in the BURP system if it's not needed for the rendering.

    Reply
  12. Rytis on

    Blender 4.50 is the internal version of the code that enables blender to run under BOINC. The actual blender version is stated in the frontpage, on the left column (it's 2.43).

    Reply
  13. Bart on

    "All sessions with obfuscated/unneeded/unclear python scripts are rejected"

    How is this going to work? Is some Python genius going to manually check *every* python script for *every* .blend that is submitted? Sounds like an unrealistic solution to me..

    I like the 'disable Python' options that Joeri suggested. Of course, BURP doesn't use your own Blender installation but installs its own, so I'm not sure how you can control that..

    Reply
  14. Clean3d on

    Do all the .blends run through this system *have* to be open source? I know that people may have access to all the content, but could you simply include a license with each file that outlined how they could be used?

    Reply
  15. S-T-S on

    @ Bart: "I like the 'disable Python' options that Joeri suggested. Of course, BURP doesn't use your own Blender installation but installs its own, so I'm not sure how you can control that.."

    I think that it could be set to use BURP account settings, like now you can modify general preferences in your account settings. This should be done at server side anyways, because it would be useless for BURP servers to send projects that use python to clients that have disabled python.

    Then the drawback is that you would be then left out of projects that use python.

    I still have no clue how to use python at RENDERING stage. Is it not possible to do everything without python? What would be the usages that absolutely require python (or usages that help in something tremendously)?

    Reply
  18. AndyK on

    [quote]I still have no clue how to use python at RENDERING stage. Is it not possible to do everything without python? What would be the usages that absolutely require python (or usages that help in something tremendously)?[/quote]

    I know one BURP rendersession which used python to control cameras for the animation... and it failed to render properly, because many windows clients (about 99%) don't have python installed...

    AndyK

    Reply
  20. Joeri on

    "I still have no clue how to use python at RENDERING stage"

    I don't think it's used much, but in advanced rigging it can be a big help.
    I use expressions in all my maya files so I should think people could be using python as well.

    For instance, in a machine you can set all rotations of gears in speeds and counter speeds according to the first gear; this way you need to only animate the first gear and all the rest will follow, also after changes.
    Drivenkeys could (well should, blender does not have them yet) be driven by formulas. The wave modifier is all nice and stuff, but for better control you'd be using your own python wave generator. These are hard to bake, and why would you? The file would get very big for no real reason. We've also once used an external data file on positions of waver steppers in an ASML machine. No real need to bake IPO's (unless you are using motion blur) out of them, just create an array, or read the file on render.

    Reply

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