V0.3.2 is out! Support for Blender 2.93, 3.0, Apple M1 and Cycles-X
So, new version is out and as a result, V0.2.10 has been made freely available. V0.2.10 supports Blender 2.83 through to 2.92 and is free, so why not go grab it and give it a try?. You can sign up for a free cloud account and try it out here.
We've been hugely busy today getting everything ready for this release, we've been testing with all sorts of different files, and added some that use the latest geometry nodes feature in blender 2.93. You can see a sample of the scenes we've rendered below which can be found by going to blender.org/download/demofiles
Why this new version?
The TLDR (you can read the release notes if you've signed up for our cloud account or you can create a new account for free and read the notes/download the addon here) is that this version supports the latest available versions of Blender, like 2.93 LTS and 3.0, plus provisional support for Cycles X. Though be warned cycles x is likely to change a lot as its not even in the alpha builds yet, so support may break. We tested V0.3.2 as working with cycles X on May 31st.
The new build, couple with blender 2.93 or 3.0 should really help get the render times down since, if you've been paying attention to our twitter feed, you'll know that blender 2.93 and 3.0 are actually already faster than 2.92 by a good margin as you'll see below.
We've also now got support for Apple's new M1 based mac computers thanks to a user who tested a new build for us on their M1 based mac.
Bug fixes are also in this version as well. There were two issues found and fixed. The first was causing a persistent sync fail that wouldn't go away even if you re-uploaded the entire blend file all over again. The symptoms appeared when at first a node goes into a sync fail status, then attempts to repair itself. Eventually going back to sync fail again. We found the cause and fixed it so that the repair now works as it should.
The second issue was that the load balancer was not recording the correct amount of time for the sync portion of the render which was throwing off balancing for renders with longer sync times. This only appeared to happen for linux based nodes though.
Whats next?
Scheduled for release over the next couple of months is V0.3.3, another patch update to support cycles X. After that we have V0.4.0 which has a review of how files are transferred between nodes. It's a pretty big update in terms of code changes, and has a slight performance improvement. The real change though is that the code is much simpler, and now uses only one network socket for file transfer in both directions.
Our brand new addon is in progress, but still in pieces all over the floor as we originally took the current addon apart and now we're faced with the task of putting it back together without any bits left over at the end :)
Support this!
If you'd like to support our work, check out our development fund page where you'll find a number of different ways to help us out :)
Special Thanks
We've been super fortunate to have Mwave Australia supply us with modern hardware, like our Ryzen based workstation with an RTX2070 Super GPU and AMD 3950X CPU. This equipment has made the development of our software possible like never before. We've been able to develop support for Optix rendering in cycles and also support Optix and CUDA based hybrid rendering.
If you're in Australia check out their website for pre-built workstations, gaming computers and components/accessories for building and enhancing your computer life :)
Get V0.3.2
The new update is currently in early access, so you'll need to have an active Crowdrender dev fund subscription, there are yearly and by the month subs available, and all subs have some perks attached to them :) You can learn more on our development fund page.
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