Cloud vs. Crowd

In contrast to conventional cloud-based render farms, the Renderhive project strives to be a fully decentralized render crowd. While render farms are nothing new, most of these services rely on some kind of central server and authority to make things work. For example, render jobs are usually sent to the cloud and, thus, executed on centralized server farms. Prices are formed based on the decision of the owner(s) of the service alone and the price formation is usually not very transparent. Furthermore, these cloud-based render farms usually have a single point of failure – if the server that receives or distributes render jobs is down, the whole service may not be available. If the company that sells the render power goes bankrupt or the owner decides to stop the service for other reasons, the render farm will disappear. This is different in decentralized projects.

The Renderhive project’s infrastructure will be fully decentralized. Instead of a single server, the render hive will consist of a multitude of nodes that communicate with each other via the distributed ledger technology of Hedera and IPFS/Filecoin. Thus, there is no single point of failure and if a node goes offline or decides to leave the network, other nodes will still be available to do the job. Render prices will be decided by each node on its own based on the nodes local electricity as well as hardware costs and its desired profit, which will result in a fair market price governed by supply and demand. All of Renderhive’s software components will be open source, which guarantees that it will be available for use forever. And instead of setting up large amounts of new servers and render farms, the Renderhive project simply puts to use the latent CPU/GPU power that exists already in countless living rooms and (home) offices of Blender artists around the world to form a global render crowd for Blender. The Renderhive project therefore lowers the hurdles and the costs to create 3D content and, thereby, supports Blender’s vision:

“Everyone should be free to create 3D CG content, with free technical and creative production means and free access to markets.”

The main advantages of a blockchain-based render crowd versus a conventional cloud-based render farm are:

• Decentralization (no single point of failure; no intermediaries)

• Free: Everyone can participate

• Fair, low market prices

• Free/open-source software

• On-chain verifiable render contracts

• On-chain verifiable, immutable copyright proofs

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