Now that we have finally put to rest the R21 + GPU render engines debacle, we can move on to other things. Agent 3.61 was just released today, and it includes support for the latest Cinema 4D S22 build. The only deployed render engines, as yet, in S22 are native, Arnold, and Redshift. The deployed Cinema 4D software page in our kbase has been updated with exact version numbers.
Newer Nvidia drivers had to be deployed to the farm prior to running Redshift builds newer than 3.0.17. Now that those drivers have been deployed, we rolled out Redshift 3.0.22 to all Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and Houdini instances. This marks the return of Redshift to Houdini 18, for us, anyway.
In case you hadn’t already seen it, Arnold was updated farm-wide in the past several weeks. We didn’t make a blog post about it at the time, but all deployed software pages were updated with version numbers following the deployment.
Planetside Software contacted us to let us know about a new Terragen Frontier build, version 4.5.38. The big news about this build is that Easy Cloud GI data is now cache-able along with other GI elements. This means smoothed/averaged GI across frame range jobs and tile-split rendering inclusion for still image jobs when Easy Clouds are used. Terragen Frontier version 4.5.38 is on the farm now.
Pixel Plow Agent version 3.61 has more communication fixes and handling for odd disconnect scenarios. It should be better than ever at handling the inconsistencies of the Internet.
Farm-side, we have implemented the latest version of our storage subsystem. While customers don’t get to see it or how it works, they certainly benefit from it. It has real-time, zero-performance-penalty deduplication, multiple tiers of in-memory caching, and vastly more capacity and throughput than any of our previous storage subsystems. To say it’s a big deal would be an understatement. This kind of work isn’t flashy, easy, or small in the scope of time required, but it is critically important as we continue to expand the infrastructure.
There’s more work to do on the plugin support front, and we are working toward that now. In the meantime, enjoy (and use) the updates!
Render Endlessly
