<p style="text-align: justify;">There has been <a href="http://www.renderfarm.fi/forum/post/8225">some discussion</a> as of late on the farm about our acceptance policies, most notably the render times. We discussed this a bit with jesterKing on IRC earlier today in regards to the differences between my single thread rendering as compared to the calculations done by users on their computers, and how come my time could have been so much shorter. We then later on had a good talk with Prodigal at the office, and considered the situation in length: What should we define as our policy? Are we truly offering free rendering for anyone in need of it? Do we need such a discreet time limit as 50 seconds per frame?<br />
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The decision was: no. The time limit originates from the BURP days where it was more important to render only what required rendering, and not use the volunteering computers for useless things. If a user has a NEED for rendering and is unable to perform it on his computer, who are we to refuse his possibly truly artistic animation purely on this sort of basis? From now on we will have no lower limits at all in regards to render time, simplicity or usage of resources - it all goes. We have only these four rules:<br />
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1. The animation must be animated. We do not render stills here.<br />
2. No Python scripts<br />
3. The animation must use the correct settings (threads, save buffers etc. Soon these aren&#39;t needed either, more below)<br />
4. Be less than 300MB in size / 3GB in memory<br />
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This will make Renderfarm.fi available for anyone anywhere without looking at their computer specs, ultimately giving you the vast rendering power freely for your usage in your art even if it wouldn&#39;t be 100% efficient. Artists don&#39;t want to think about limits like this, and we won&#39;t be forcing them anymore. We do keep an eye on things that pass through to make sure that no volunteering resources are utterly wasted, but this hasn&#39;t been an issue so far, and probably won&#39;t be a large one even later on.<br />
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To move into something else, we also did some re-designing for the uploader script today. We aim to remove large portions of it in relation to the new method of rendering that is &quot;soon&quot; arriving, but we are also changing its layout dramatically. We don&#39;t have a schedule for this yet, but now that we are beginning to be at a very good state in regards to rendering power and (mostly) stability, it is time to improve our usability instead of only the technology. We are most likely changing the way the uploading happens, trying to minimize the settings the user has to insert and give more focus into getting all the .blends through safely. Now there are a million different boxes and buttons, some of which are entirely useless (two description fields?). Depending on how soon we get started on this you can expect an entirely fresh Uploader Script coming later on.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Happy free rendering folks!</p>