Best Wishes for 2018 and New Music Coming

Hi, first of all I'd like to wish to all the very best for 2018. Happy New-year ! I know some of you wonder if I'm still alive. Well the answer is yes, but the last years I have been very busy with both RenderFarm.NL and Virtiso. By now I have sold both of these companies and I'm a free man again. In the end it gave me too much stress and I almost suffered another burnout. So I decided it was enough. I'm still involved in the background with my first company BIT BV, and will continue to do so. No plans at this moment to start something new. The good news from this all is that I had time to completely rebuild the studio last year. I sold a lot of my vintage synthesizers and bought new stuff equipment back. I also bought some synthesizers I had as keys back as modules without a keyboard. I took all cabling out and completely redid everything. On of the new additions it the Roland V-Piano you see me playing on here. I really love this thing. The 88 keys weighted keyboard is so nice to play on. I will show more of the new studio is later posts. I also got asked a lot if new music is coming. Yes there is! I'm currently working on 2 solo albums, and also a collaboration album again with Ron Boots and also another one with Remy Stroomer. I recently also finished a single track for a sampler CD that will be released soon. I will update you all on this in time as well. I hope to release at last one of these albums in 2018. I'm working on it. Thank for you interest and let me know if you have any questions.

Very Powerfull 3D Work Station

I promised to write something about the new 3D work station that I put in my new office. Even though I can use the render farm for animations it is nice to have a very powerful PC to work on the 3D projects. Primarily you need a very powerful video card to use the GPU for screen calculations. I installed a Asus Nvidea GTX 690 for this. But also CPU power is helpful since you do need to render out a single frame on high quality to see how it is going to look later on when you render the animation on the render farm. And you don't want to wait for ever. So in this machine is a special work station mother board from Asus called the Z9 PE-D8WS and on there are two Intel Xeon processors of the type 2796 V2. Actually the fastest processors out there. They actually have 12 CPU cores each so that makes 24 CPU cores in one machine!

I also installed 64 Gbytes of RAM and it boots its OS and loads its applications from a super fast OCZ Revo Drive 3. This is kind of a SSD drive on a dedicated PCIe card. The there is a OCZ Vertex 4 for the data I'm working on for the project and a Raid 1 set of two Sata disks for storage of larger files. The Asus mother board is very big, so I needed to buy a very large case to fit it all. And then to keep things a bit quiet I installed a lot of large cooling fans with a special fan control unit that you can see in the picture below. This really is a monster PC that makes working on the most complicated projects a breeze. For your idea this PC scores 2960 CB points in Cinebench where my normal Render Node Servers in the render farm score about 1000 CB.

The fan controller is also very nice. It has a touch screen where you can regulate the desired temperature for each fan. There are sensors attached to this controller on certain spots in the machine, like CPU's, GPU's, drives etc and it regulates the fan speeds to keep this temperatures. This results in a very quiet PC when it is idle and just a little bit of noise when it is at 100% CPU. I also have some software where I don't have licenses for the render farm yet, so for those applications I also use this machine to render frames for customers on RenderFarm.NL. I recently did a series of Vue renders on this machine for a customer. It is not a cheap machines as you can imagine but it does have the power of three normal PC's. I already had a lot of pleasure from it. I hope this post can help anyone else that need to spec a very nice 3D work station. But for animations do contact me for the use of the render farm so you can work on other projects on your work station during the rendering of your animation.

Our New Office Space

As some of you might know I resigned in 2012 as CEO from BIT BV, the company that I founded together with my business partner in 1996. Don't worry we didn't sell it, but I didn't like the job of being CEO any more. I like working with my hand more and that wasn't possible anymore in the company. I'm still connected closely but in the background. So in 2012 I started a new company and since then I've been very busy setting up some new services and have been working on several products.

In the beginning of the year we did a little renovation at home, mainly putting in a new floor. Since both myself and my wife work from home now we decided to build a little office at home. In the picture above you see my work space on the left and hers on the right. Here is a close-up of my workspace. It is mainly focussed on doing both maintenance of the Virtiso and the Render Farm hardware/cloud platforms and also on doing 3D design and animation stuff for Van Osenbruggen Productions. I can also work on my videos for here now. I'm currently working on new websites for Virtiso and the RenderFarm so more on that soon and also on what I do there. I know I haven't posted here in the while, but I will try do pick that up again.

Here is some of the input devices I use. On top (almost our of site) is a track pad, left a track ball in the middle a 3D mouse, then on the right my Oculus Rift and below a drawing pad. They all have their use in my work flow even though the Oculus is mainly for fun :). So this is where I spend a lot of my time lately. I also build a very special work station. I will do another post on the soon.

So I can hear some of your thinking. Did he stop making music? No I didn't! To be honest I can't wait to get back to that very soon, but I just had to start up all this new business too. That took a lot of time. Unfortunately as many of you know, you can't make a living from music any more especially the kind of music I make with Synth.nl. I will pick that up for sure soon. I plan some changes in the studio first that I will tell you about as well. OK enough on the office now. I just wanted to share with you what has been happening here lately.

Biz2Be 3D Logo Animation

I made another 3D Logo Animation. This this for Biz2Be. It was animated in Cinema 4D and it was rendered in High Quality on RenderFarm.NL. The customer uses the logo as intro and outro of his videos that you can find on http://www.biz2be.nl.

Meet Tracy Ray at RenderFarm.NL

As you all know by now probably one of the new companies I'm setting up is a commercial Render Farm. This new company is called RenderFarm.NL and it has a new face. She is called Tracy Ray. Tracy is in charge of all our render cows that are at your immediate disposal. I'm still working hard on the new website but the render farm is already operational, so do contact me (or Tracy) if you have a deadline and need some frames rendered. We support a lot of software already and are always open for new things. Even custom setups are possible. If you know people that are in the media / content creation or 3D animation business then please point them to us. Our contact details are on the website at http://www.renderfarm.nl

Let us know when you have a render job. You can e-mail me at tracy@renderfarm.nl for a quote.

Makerbot Tractor 360 degrees animation

And here is a 360 degrees view of the 3D model of the Makerbot tractor as I promised. I hope it will help someone to do a better 3D print from this :)

Datacenter Pyramid Animation

A little animation I made for a customer to show the management what happens with their ICT infrastructure if they don't put fire surpression in the power distribution are of their data center. The animation was made in Cinema 4D, the fire was done with Turbulence FD, I used a soft body dynamics for the rest. The Animation was rendered on the RenderFarm.NL render farm.

NewTek LightWave 1.6 now on RenderFarm.NL

From today RenderFarm.NL also supports NewTek's LightWave version 1.6. So If you use this 3D application and you need affordable render capacity for your 3D animations you can contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl. I also did some minor updates on the RenderFarm.nl website that you can find on http://www.renderfarm.nl

VrayForC4D update on RenderFarm.NL

Last week I upgraded all the VrayForC4D installations on the render farm to version 1.8.1. This version is quite a major upgrade and is now based on the Vray 2.45 kernel. I am running this on C4D R13, R14 and R15 now on the farm.

If you are interested in running a job on my render farm then do contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl

Autodesk 3D Studio Max now on RenderFarm.NL

I'm happy to announce that now also Autodesk 3D Studio Max is installed on the Render Farm. We installed versions 2014, 2013 and 2012. We also did an initial test with a customer, but unfortunately we are seeing some problems with path references. My own knowledge lies with Cinema 4D so we are looking for a solution at the moment. If you have experience with 3D Studio Max and Render Farms and can help us out, do let me know. I will give some premium time on the Render Farm in return. We also added some new servers. We have 114 dedicated CPU cores at your service and the Render Farm scores 18.360 Cinebench R15 points at the moment. We also just updated Blender to version 2.69. You can contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl if you are interested in rendering on the farm or have experience with 3D Studio Max and Render Farms.

Blender on the Render Farm

Even though I'm a very happy Cinema 4D user, the first thing I bumped into when I tried to find customers for the Render Farm is that not everyone is using Cinema 4D of course. There are many 3D design applications out there. One of them is even completely free since it is open source and it is called Blender. You can download it and install it and start working with it right away. I was actually amazed how powerful it is. Anyway: last week I installed Blender on the Render Farm and I did some successful testing with it. So if you use Blender (or C4D) and you have a large animation to render give me a shout and maybe we can work something out. I'm sure I can render it much faster on the render farm than you can do yourself on your own PC. More information on Blender here: http://www.blender.org/

Installing C4D R15 on Render Farm

Yesterday I got a nice package in the mail. The new version of Maxon Cinema 4D R15. As you all know I have been busy with 3D animations for a while. This version really looks great again. They even promise render speed increases of up to 300%!! I can't wait for that. Rendering in high quality always takes to long. For that reason I have been building a render farm over the last years that finally is taking shape. I hope to make a commercial service out of this somewhere this year as well. I'm already talking to some potential customers. I will tell you more about the render farm very soon, but if you are interested in a lot of CPU's then don't hesitate to contact me already, since the render farm is already operational. OK back to installing this new version on a lot of servers.