Links

D) Network Core Technologies

The RNDR Network is built on OctaneRender, the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, and physically correct renderer. The web-based client that a Operator installs runs a version of Octane on the node in order to process rendering tasks. Creators requesting rendering tasks use OctaneRender to configure their scenes for processing. Octane renders photorealistic images by exploiting graphics cards to run light scattering computations on thousands of parallel GPU cores - processing scenes faster than conventional CPU rendering techniques. Because of its efficiency, OctaneRender was the first commercial render engine to deploy fully unbiased path-tracing methods to achieve physically correct rendering results. Tracing how light and energy bounce around a scene, Octane necessarily anchors its algorithms in the laws of physics, accounting for everything from the velocity of light in exotic substances to interference patterns in sub-surface scattering in human skin. Octane uniquely combines its blazing speed with supreme accuracy, enabling Creators to achieve ultra realistic results in a fraction of the time. Users can test rendering speeds using OctaneBench, a GPU benchmarking tool generated by Octane users running speed tests across a wide variety of GPU and system configurations.
‌The RNDR Network uses Octane in conjunction with the open standard ORBX media and streaming framework in order to support fully distributed rendering. ORBX is a container format that captures scene data (assets) and an XML (extensible markup language) render graph which describes the semantics of a scene. Just like a web page, it can be cached to archive (.orbx file) or streamed from a URL or URI over raw UDP/tcp or web wss or https. The ORBX format supports over 20 of the industry leading DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools, and contains industry standard sub formats like Alembic, OpenVDB, EXR, Open Shader Language (OSL), and gLTF. The ORBX interchange format is critical for splitting rendering work from host 3D applications. A one-click ORBX export from a 3D content creation tool fully decouples all assets and code needed to perform a remote GPU render job on multiple mining nodes. By fully abstracting scene data from third party software tools with the ORBX scene format, RNDR is able to parallelize work across a blockchain peer-to-peer network. ORBX interchange works regardless of host application, providing efficient, open, software-agnostic distributed rendering.
The RNDR network also leverages the ORBX scene graph to enable deep chain of authorship and validation, allowing users to build microservices on top of a peer-to-peer rendering platform. Every time a user uploads a scene and a node operator processes a job on the RNDR network, all assets and settings in the ORBX render graph are hashed. With assets in a scene attributed in ORBX XML render graph, the network has a semantic history of every object and setting within a scene. As a result, with the ORBX scene graph, the network is able to track transfer, recomposition and re-usage rights through tokenized rendering and streaming processes. The Hashing of the ORBX render graph and scene data provides immutable and granular history of all assets and work processed on the RNDR network. Thus, as assets move through the network, ORBX provides full traceability needed for attribution and authorship.
Finally, ORBX is used as a file standard for holographic media payback and distribution. The format enables interoperability across 3D tools and well as the distribution of fully volumetric six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) scene data for holographic experiences like playback for the Manifold VR camera. ORBX.js streaming technology delivers high performance 3D games and desktop applications to the open Web – using only HTML5 and JavaScript. Because ORBX.js is browser based, it bypasses apps or downloads, enabling frictionless publishing of immersive media experiences to multiple endpoints like VR, AR, and mobile. With ORBX, users can share ultra-realistic low latency graphics, as well as leverage the format’s scene graph to develop hybrid crowd sourced rendered experiences that combine ultra high resolution or light-field precomputing with real time raytracing. The ORBX framework is open and accessible in OctaneRender Modules, allowing third party developers to build additional ORBX-based applications or services through an API.
‌Both ORBX and Octane are extensible, supporting most mainstream 3D content creation tools, The Octane SDK is also available to third parties that want to expand the ecosystem to new tools. For example, the RNDR API can be used for third party applications that leverage the network to re-render multiple permutations of scenes with quick and lightweight material and texture swaps. Capabilities like Delta sync enable users to leverage RNDR to precompute scene changes without re-uploading a new ORBX file - opening up new B2B applications on the network. Octane is available on Windows, Linux, and iOS with a new Vulkan multi-back compute framework designed for Apple Metal, AMD and Intel Integrated graphics.