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About Us
Story, Team, Vision for the future
The Story so far
Crowdrender started when James was struggling to make university assignments more interesting. Rendering always took too long. The long render times meant that he found it difficult to get projects completed on time and frequently ran over deadlines.
After looking around but not finding a solution he was happy with, James managed to convince his mate Jeremy that they should make a tool for speeding up rendering in Blender. In July 2013 James, Jeremy and Martin started a company to do 'something' with this idea. Eventually that idea became a network rendering tool that would let any one use multiple computers to render a single project.
In 2016, after visiting Amsterdam for the blender conference, this website was launched and we managed to see about 30 people (mostly from the conference) show 'some' interest in the prototype we demonstrated. It was a small beginning in every sense of the word!
Then in 2017 we made the first version of our addon for Blender available from this very website. It was a pretty rough piece of software, but some people started using it and provide precious feedback. Just like art, making software is much easier with feedback, either from your own testing, or that of others!
In 2018 we raised some money from friends and family and managed to win a government grant to build a prototype that would allow people to combine their own hardware with the cloud, later that year we also raised roughly $1500 from the community on indiegogo, just 3% of our target. We officially bombed at crowdfunding on our first go! The the best thing about the campaign was the video made by Joel Phillips which I highly recommend you watch below.
Today Crowdrender has over 18'000 user accounts, more than 200 people supporting its development fund, and its website is the first hit for "render farm software" most days :).
We've released a lot of different versions and talked with tons of artists from all over the world, its been a mad cool ride so far :) Next up, the team who've made this possible :)
Meet the team
Vision for the future
Quite simply, there are billions of computers on earth, but most of us will only have access to few, or just one.
Since the internet was invented, its possible to render on a computer miles away, even in another country (so far our furthest render was Austrlia to Switzerland!).
We think it would be awesome if there was a platform for accessing computer power from everywhere, homes, offices, friends, the cloud, anywhere!
So thats what we're working on, a new platform for compute sharing and the technologies to make it easy to use.
:)