oh cool i run the most quantity of renders until you close it jeje

Hi again Scrubs, I have another question. I noticed that this online rendering has a feature that adds wear to the parts, like fingerprints and scratches. Is this going to cost money in the future, seeing that it does to have this feature in Blender?

It may or it may not. I didn't fully decide yet how it is going to work but as you can imagine there will be a pay part of it. I don't intend to pay thousands of dollars in power every year myself. I am not that nice (and not that rich :-)). Plus there is also the cost of the hardware to factor into the equation.

Oh I see, thanks for responding 😃

That makes sense, Scrubs. I understand you not wanting to pay thousands of dollars for a rendering machine. Besides I would subtract a substantial amount of money from your "multimillion-dollar fund". You deserve to keep that horde of money! 😛

Ah...so, if we want to render using the Mecabricks render farm from now on, it's going to cost us money? Am I getting that right?

Yes and no. It will still be possible to render images but with limitations. To unlock all the settings it is going to cost a little bit of money. I will present all of it in a few weeks but I can tell you that it will be really affordable. For a simple HD image it shall be somewhere between 10 to 50 cents and for simple 4K between 50c to $2. The price is automatically calculated based on the render time and the power of the render nodes.
I already invested more than $6K USD in hardware and running this beast will probably cost another $2000 to $3000 a year in power. So I hope people understand that it is impossible to run that for free.

So we can render a simple image for free, but for anything else we will need to pay?

That sounds...awesome!

Oh...so the free images apparently are automatically rendered with the Mecabricks logo in the bottom right corner...interesting.

When you make some type of documentation between the difference of the free and paid renders, I think that would be important to list as a heads up for those who can't/do not want to pay and are interested in doing the free option.

From what I was trying, the only models I can really render are just minifigures.

@LeGoMaNiAc02, Yes apparently it does come with a cool flashy Mecabricks logo in the free version! Wish there was an option in the paid version to add it to show where it's been made! 😉

@Sealund, Well, it is cool in a sense, if you want to have that displayed on your image. But It does also take up quite a lot of space in the bottom right corner, especially when your image dimensions that you are allowed to render in the free version is limited, making the logo cover some of your scene if you don't change your angle before you render.

I understand the purpose of it, but it would be nice if it could be a wee bit smaller. As for the paid version, you could easily add it yourself using Photoshop if you have it, or http://www.photopea.com which is like a free version of Photoshop online 😉

Yes i agree that the logo is quite big for the small free resolutions, but it would be nice to be able to select in which corner it will be added to.

Of course it's possible to post edit and add a logo, but it's easier if it's done automatically. 😉

@Scrubs I noticed on Twitter you wrote, "Multiple Importance Sampling is now calculated to fit the environment map. It reduces the noise a lot for detailed HDRIs" and I'm wondering if this is something you wrote in code or if it's something new to Blender? In either case, is it something that is available in the Blender Advanced Addon plugin?

Are you going to continue to make updates to the Blender plugins, or will it mainly only be for the Mecabricks render farm renderer from now on?

The advantage with the render farm is that I have a complete control over how the scene is built and what goes in which is not the case otherwise. This is typically the type of tweak that I cannot provide in the add-ons. I cannot monitor the HDRI that you load for example. I will continue to maintain them for what they are. The add-on is only a little piece in the big picture of the render farm system as you can imagine.

@Scrubs Will the render farm eventually be able to do other types of lights for rendering? Like, emissive or object/piece-based lights?

Yes it will eventually for renders using credits - Not too sure when as it will be a massive coding project.

Hi, Scrubs, I have a question. I do free renderings, without all the extra features. However, today I was about to render a new sigfig and the render button won't click. I checked all settings to make sure I only had the basic features, not even Hi-def minifigures, and it still wont pop up the button. I also made sure I was no where near the 20-per-day limit. Please help!
-ArmoredBricks

I think the render farm might be offline. I had the same problem a while ago.