New plug-in puts cloud rendering inside Blender

A proof-of-concept movie showing GreenButton running within Right Hemisphere’s DeepExploration.

A New Zealand software developer has released a free plug-in that enables Blender users to render scenes in the cloud, from directly within their 3D software.

InterGrid’s GreenButton plug-in enables users of Blender and fellow open-source package LuxRender to switch jobs between their local machine and the cloud, vastly speeding up turnaround.

The proof-of-concept movie above shows a 90-frame test animation that takes hours to render on a Core i7 workstation being completed in a couple of minutes across 90 quad-core machines in the cloud.

As with a traditional online renderfarm, a variety of pricing packages are available for the rendering itself, ranging from a flat fee of $19.95 per month to 30 cents per core hour.

According to the company newsfeed, InterGrid is now working on versions of the plug-in for 3ds Max and Maya.

Useful stuff. And InterGrid has pedigree in the field, too. Company CEO Scott Houston was CTO at Weta during its Oscar-winning work on The Lord of the Rings movies.

View a proof-of-concept demo of the Maya plug-in

Download the GreenButton Blender plug-in (Designed for 2.55, but works with 2.5x)