Streamlined Validation Phase, Storage, Eevee, and More
Validation is far faster and robust, EEVEE rendering has better compatibility on older Blender versions (3.3 and older), downloads are faster.
Improved Storage Infra
- Faster downloads of outputs (in most scenarios, let us know if not)
- This also improves speed to boot, since we use the same storage systems to get your files to the render nodes and out back to you.
Overall, we’ve improved the way we handle file storage across all of Renderjuice. This paves the way for streamlining the packing, uploading, and iterating process overall. We’ve heard that this is a big pain point so we’re excited to have taken the first major step towards a better experience.
Validation is way faster and more robust
- Skip the validation phase if you’ve already validated! If you’ve already rendered a particular file, maybe for a test, and then wanted to re-render, you can now skip validation. Teams that render parallel jobs will benefit from this. You should see this option on the bottom of the screen when you configure your job.
- Validation is far more robust - there were scenarios when users wouldn’t see an error message even though there was one! In the worst cases, users just would have to wait and figure out that some error occurred. We’ve largely fixed that.
- Thoroughly faster validation phase, time should be cut by in half in many scenarios.
We’ve heard some teams, when in a tight timeline, really don’t want to wait long to validate their files. This is the first of a series of improvements we have planned to cut down the time to validate and skip altogether when possible. Next up, we’re enabling the ability to configure your settings more deeply right in the UI so you don’t have to re-upload your files when trying to tweak render settings like sample count, resolution, etc.
Rendering Tests & Improved EEVEE compatibility:
- Renders now have better EEVEE compatibility on older versions of Blender (3.3 and older)
- Renders now have better stability across the board and more ‘in-tune’ with Blender’s later versions.
- Our test suite is far more comprehensive which has proven to be necessary with the latest major rendering updates in Blender v4.0 and up. Some of these tests far more complex composite node setups, grease pencil usage, and ACES tests.
Our improvements to the rendering process pave the way for upcoming Blender releases. As you may have noticed, Blender has been shipping a ton of major improvements to the render pipeline lately, we want to be on top of that. There was a lot of deep wizardry and engineering to get this done.
Internal Improvements - Improved SecOps and Keeping our whats-new page and changelog up to date
- We streamlined the ways we configure our environments in a secure manner that should help us get more improvements out to you faster.
- We shipped our own internal little bot we call “Benji” to make our communication of changes to you far more streamlined. The more time we can spend shipping improvements, the better.
- The whole process behind Whats New page and Product Updates are more streamlined. If you’ve noticed, we haven’t done a great job of keeping it up to date even though we’ve shipped a ton! This will fix that.
This was a big update with >160 commits!
Thank the team if you’re enjoying any of em and reach out if you’re facing any issues with them!
