Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Crowdrender Dev Fund | Help us create awesome software for faster

1

Jamesy writes:

Why should you help us create render farm software? With the advent of eevee and hardware accelerated ray tracing, surely render farms (and distributed rendering) are outdated in 2020?

Yet the numbers show that rendering is still an issue, especially for the cycles engine. Since blender 2.80 launched we've had the highest growth in people visiting our website, ever, and we've seen more commercial render farms being created.

In fact, as our user accounts crossed the 10'000 mark, we were being overwhelmed! Crowdrender started out as an idea, turned into a prototype and then turned into quite a popular addon. We never imagined we'd be supporting so many users and getting so many demands for new features (and fixes of course!).

We've been so blessed to have made it this far. But, the cost of giving away our software and time took its toll. Late 2019, we'd run out of resources to keep funding the growth of our expenses, and the time required to support people needing help.

We almost went mad trying to figure out what to do...

...but there were two guys who gave us hope and an answer.

Without ever being asked, they started donating regularly each month. I spoke to one of them who said he wanted to support us because our software made his project (which he was very passionate about) possible. Without it, his render times were so long, he struggled to make progress.

So we started asking for regular contributions to make Crowdrender sustainable, and right now, we're nearly three quarters of the way to our first goal of $750 a month to cover our operational expenses!

We've now got a plan to follow in Blender's footsteps and become sustainable through community funding. So we've created a campaign on our website to meet not only operational costs but development as well.

And we'd love you to join our adventure! We've designed our tiers to be sustainable for even occasional users, our first tier is just $4 a month, which gives you access to:

  • the new system we're building (our current software is free to download and use, even for commercial purposes)
  • a higher priority for support; and
  • your name on our website.

For more details, and to signup to support our project go to our campaign page.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post :D

About the Author

Avatar image for James
James

I'm a software engineer, I've worked on numerous technologies over the past 10 years. I started out working on full motion flight simulators and then worked with embedded systems. I now work on building an add-on to support rendering using multiple computers over internet/local networks. I started using blender in 2009 and have done small projects with it since then, however, crowd render, our network rendering add-on is by far the biggest adventure with Blender to date.

1 Comment

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×