Blendergrid Renders A 3D NFT Collection For Fewocious

Blendergrid, based in The Hague, Netherlands, is pleased to acknowledge that they were able to provide their assistance in rendering a collection of 40,000 NFT animations for Fewocious. With their help, the project took 3 days instead of 7 years. The company is tackling PAINT, a generative art project by FEWOCiOUS which consists of 40,000 Paint Drops. Each paint drop is a unique 3D animation, which symbolizes a building block of the FewoWorld universe. Learn more here: https://blendergrid.com/learn/articles/rendering-40000-3d-nft-animations.

The production team behind this project reached out to Blendergrid because rendering 40,000 3D animations required a huge amount of render power. For the Blender animations, Geometry nodes were used to create the unique paint drops, which are all in a generative workflow (which Geometry nodes are perfect for). This gives them a wide range of effects and artistic styles. 40,000 animations, each consisting of 200 frames, are quite a massive feat of rendering, so the original creators asked if the Blendergrid render farm was capable of handling it. Blendergrid has a lot of experience rendering huge projects fast, but this was a new challenge. Blendergrid has prior experience with rendering many different animations based on a single .blend file, so the team decided to use the workflow which was developed for that. In this case, 40,000 animations of 200 frames meant they had a total of 8 million frames to render.

Calculations revealed that it would take about 7 years to render all 8 million frames on an average computer, but the deadline was in 3 days. Blendergrid partnered with Logan, the creator of a tool called FZRandomizer, which is a very useful Blender add-on which allows a user to randomize characters and other mesh objects, though eventually this was not used. The vast number of variations was organized by using .csv files and custom Python scripts, and the paint drop variations were created by a workflow using Geometry Nodes. This allowed the team to specify a variation by simply plugging in different values into the Geometry Nodes Modifier. A base template was also created. To be able to render 8 million frames on such a tight deadline, Blendergrid had to reserve almost all of their computing capacity for this project while simultaneously trying to increase the total compute capacity as well. A render cluster software also rendered many of the animations in parallel, which was what allowed 7 years’ worth of rendering to be completed in just a few days.

Blendergrid has identified the need for and chosen to target users and project creators who are interested in turning their 3-dimensional models or scenes into a collection of 3D renders. The platform accomplishes this using generative or automated methods, meaning that they do not need to manually render each individual 3D model. Turning a model in Blender into a series of unique renders is what Blendergrid specializes in. Using various ‘materials’ or by adding various accessories, they create thousands of variations of their client’s pieces.

Blendergrid (Blender + Grid) is a grid of thousands of computers running Blender. This means that the platform can help a user save time by rendering a project very quickly. The platform does this by dividing the project in question into small, bite-sized chunks (for computers) and rendering multiple chunks simultaneously on multiple different computers. This can make rendering more than a thousand times faster when comparing it with a regular personal computer. Blendergrid was founded by Richard van der Oost, who recognized that there was a need for a platform which served as a render farm for large-scale projects. “We are getting more and more requests to render 3D NFT projects, and we've started preparing our infrastructure to the specific needs of NFT rendering,” says Richard van der Oost.

To learn more about Blendergrid, and the recent projects that they have partnered with, interested parties may visit their official website. The team can also be reached via phone or email.