BTN 5/10/24 —BCON LA 2024 Recap | RNP:014 Final Vote | Beeple’s Digital Art Death Match | Octane X on M4
This week’s BTN dives into new Render initiatives featured in Jules’s Blender’s BCON LA keynote talk, as well as the latest updates in a busy week for the network that began with Beeple’s Digital Art Death Match and ended with a feature of Octane X in Apple’s keynote releasing the M4 chip.
Jules’s BCON LA talk showcased how the Render Network is supporting millions of new users in the Blender ecosystem — the leading open source 3D creation pipeline. He discussed how the network is expanding access to high performance GPU rendering tools and laid out a vision for the future of AI and next generation fully immersive spatial media workflows.
This summary briefly highlights several key themes discussed in the presentation from new Render Network initiatives like RNP-014 to technologies paving the way for the creation of a real life holodeck.
RNP-14: Blender Cycles Render Network Integration
At BCON, Jules unveiled the recently proposed RNP-014, which focuses on integrating Blender’s Cycles physically-based path GPU tracing engine into the Render Network — making high performance cinematic rendering tools accessible to over 2-million Blender users. The proposal, now in final vote by the Render Network community, seeks to add Blender Cycles as a new third party render engine on the Render Network, joining Redshift and Arnold as other render engines on the network’s integration roadmap.
In order to support the integration, RNP-014 outlines two key features that are aimed at assisting artists in the Blender Ecosystem with using Render.
- Blender OctaneRender Plugin: After the integration of Blender Cycles reaches a stable release, RNP-014 proposes integrating OTOY’s proprietary OctaneRender plugin for Blender on Render. This subsequent step will further expand the rendering capabilities available to the Blender community on the Render Network.
- Render Network Wizard for Blender: Following RNP-012: Render Network Wizard for Maxon Cinema 4D, which aims to further support the integration of C4D on the Render Network with a simple to use scene checker, a similar wizard application is proposed for Blender. This wizard will seamlessly integrate with Blender, guiding artists through the mandatory scene preparation steps and helping reduce user errors when scaling rendering work to Render Network nodes.
Full details about RNP can be viewed here. The proposal, which has successfully passed the initial community vote, is now open for the final vote (until next Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PST).
The Archive: The Future of Immersive Media and AI
After discussing RNP-014, the main focus of Jules’s BCON keynote was on the future of immersive media technology, generative AI, and prototypes for these next generation experiences showcased in The Archive.
Neural Rendering + AI — A key technology presented was neural rendering, where Jules demonstrated the early exceptional ability of AI to convert photos into detailed 3D models and scenes that can be digitally augmented. Examples included impressive de-aging effects and makeup transfers, showcasing AI’s potential to create new forms of hyper-realistic digital art.
Making Star Trek’s Holodeck a Reality — Drawing inspiration from Star Trek, particularly Gene Roddenberry’s concept of the Holodeck, Urbach shared his vision for “Turing complete” reality rendering, creating virtual guilds that resemble that of the real world. This ambitious goal highlights Render Network and OTOY’s mission to push the boundaries of what digital rendering can achieve by not just simulating visual imagery with full scientifically accurate fidelity, but adding layers of intelligence to media critical to the advancement of AI.
Jules discussed these concepts as part of the Render Network’s membership in IDEA (the Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance) which is tasked with creating open standards for holographic and AI media. He also elaborated on the partnership between the Render Network, OTOY, Endeavor, and Emad Mostaque — Founder of Stability AI — to shape open standards, rights protocols, and 3D generative AI models for the film and entertainment industry to leverage.
The intersection of AI and Hollywood — The collaboration with Emad, Endeavor, and Render Network has a strategic objective to develop new 3D generative AI models built from scratch using artist generated models with full royalty tracking, usage permissions, and chain provenance.
In the short term, this collaboration will focus on two key initiatives:
- Ensuring Data Integrity: The collaboration will enhance temporal stability in datasets, ensuring they are robust and reliable for use in AI-driven processes.
- Recognizing Artist Contributions: Central to the initiative is acknowledging and rewarding artists for their contributions to the datasets. This ensures that artists receive proper recognition and compensation for their creative inputs to generative AI models.
Preserving Gene Roddenberry’s Legacy with Immersive Technology
The talk concluded with a discussion of the ongoing collaboration between the Roddenberry estate to preserve Gene Roddenberry’s lifetime of works, which now features recent 16K by 16K renderings done for The Archive app on the Apple Vision Pro and a roadmap for fully immersive experiences.
The ability to bring very-large format outputs on the cloud through Render Network to Blender was discussed as a near-term goal. This ongoing collaboration aims to advance the future of immersive media leading towards glasses-less holographic displays towards the end of this decade, leveraging the technology of Render Network partner, Light Field Lab.
Beeple’s Digital Art Death Match
Last weekend, Beeple partnered with Mograph.com and the Render Network to host the #DigitalArtDeathMatch at his immersive gallery space in Charleston, SC. The event featured art from across the web3 ecosystem, with creators pushing the boundary of AI, 3D, and generative art. The main event was a March Madness style bracket of 30 minute art competitions between some of the leading 3D artists in the world, all using Octane.
At the event, the Render Network hosted a panel on emerging trends in 3D creation — from immersive media to AI — with leading 3D artist Min Shi and Render Network users, David Ariew, Brilly, Josh Pierce, and Phil Roberts.
Octane user and EVERYDAY artist Joshua Brockett (@Joshua_Brockett) won the competition with a stunning 30 minute creation powered by Octane’s unbiased GPU path-tracing.
The event was a breakout success drawing rave reviews from the Render community. A few highlights were Josh Pierce’s recaps of his experience and David Ariew’s comparison of the event to Project Runway x Face Off.
Apple M4 Keynote Features Octane X
#OctaneX was featured in Apple’s recent keynote on the future of the iPad Pro and its latest 3nm M4 chipset — which features game-changing new hardware GPU raytracing and expanded AI compute capabilities.
With Octane X supported on the Render Network, Apple users can now augment the over 2x increase in rendering power on the M4 by uploading scenes to the Render Network, accessing near unlimited high performance decentralized GPU compute power on the network.
The release is a preview of the increasing miniaturization the 3nm generation of silicon is enabling, bringing advanced hardware accelerated raytracing and AI compute capabilities to mobile devices. This has the potential to expand the surface area of 3D rendering and AI inference from millions to hundreds of millions of developers and creators — with the cloud and DePIN augmenting advanced on-device compute.
News and Updates
RNP-015: Availability Rewards Opens for Community Discussion:
RNP-015: Availability Rewards was released for community discussion this week. The proposal aims to establish a mechanism for availability rewards given to Node Operators, providing incentives for long tail node providers on the network. These rewards provide RENDER emissions for node uptime, helping to incentivize supply in a multi-sided network. Distribution is be based on uptime using a weighted points system to equitably allocate RENDER rewards and can enhance decentralization on the network.
Join the Discord conversation to help shape the future of the network here.
Emad Mostaque Joins Render Community Discussions to Discuss RNP-011
In March, Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque submitted RNP-011: Piwa — Creating Millions of 3D Training Assets to join forces with Render Network to create and augment one billion 3D assets for model training.
This week, he joined community discussions in the official Render Network Telegram server to share updates on finalizing token economic design systems and progress on model training, distributed dataset creation, augmentation, fine-tuning, and rendering, which are well-suited for DePIN networks but still require strong base models.
“[I] have been crunching on token economic design systems. Just emerging now as nearly finalised some stuff.
On the AI model and Depin side I think we are seeing more and more the importance of data and advances in distributed inference, data augmentation and maybe even model training.
On the Holodeck side the meta quest 2 at $199 is a super interesting guide to the future as is the open sourcing of reality os.
If you look at the cost of goods and the advances in the latest Qualcomm X and Apple m4 processor that is enough processing power and quality of interface to drive truly new experiences
Very interesting time”
— Emad Mostaque in Render Network Telegram Channel
FVCKRENDER Launches Next Gen Digital Art at Frieze NY
Render Network OG FVCKRENDER hosted a solo exhibition, ‘Ascend’ in New York City as part of Frieze New York. During the show, he released ‘BIG CARE//’ an innovative networked tokenized physical art piece, which sold out 300 shares to leading web3 collectors. The work will be stored in his new gallery in Vancouver and loaned out for public viewings based on the decisions made by the collective owners. FVCKRENDER also released galaxy expansions to his LVCIDIA virtual world that is now in beta.
Community Art Showcase
Brilly’s McLaren F1 piece was rendered on the network: Without reading the artist’s tweet, would you think this piece is real or rendered?
In 2024, Render Network user Pi-Slices reached 10 years of creating GIFs every day and 3-billion views — pushing forward the rise of the everyday art movement that has been popularized by artists like Beeple.
Keep up with our weekly Render Digest threads on X, highlighting the latest in AI, spatial community, and the Render Network:
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