As you know by migrating to the streaming server we observed a small problem with the player causing by a pause-play event a lag which can either start infinity buffering or a video-sound shift for some short time. Trying to find what exactly is causing the problem we found that on both streaming server and the player is a small bug. Now, before I will explain a bit deeper about the problem and the workaround I will mention again the technology we are using here for playing the videos. The streaming server isn’t anything which isn’t use normally used on the web. Actually this Adobe Streaming server or technology is one of the most used in the world and even Amazon using this kind of streams. It allows what the name stands for and instead of progressive download the streaming server stream video, so you download only what you watch and you can seek to any part of the video without waiting for the player to download it. The reasons why we choose this solution I mentioned few times before and I will not repeat this again. The player which we use is Flowplayer, again it’s one of the most used player around and developed for several years. Looking on both of these solutions you just can’t claim to us that this is bad or wrong, the solution and technology is ok, but as usually, bugs occurs. The good news is, we are trying to solve the bugs on the side of the server and I really hope we will.

Probably you already noticed that we changed the player for playing our tutorials one more time and went from DarkOnyx player to the famous Flowplayer. The reason why we did this was very simple. Even though DarkOnyx as a player but also as a web management system was good the development on this project is stopped and there is no information if the development will continue or not. This was the main reason why we were searching and decided to implement instead of DarkOnyx, Flowplayer. I think i don’t have to introduce the player because it belongs between the top on the web and it’s constantly developed. In this moment we decided for the flash version of the player instead of the HTML5 version which so far don’t meet our requirements and don’t supports streaming which is crucial for us and also one of the reasons why we have a dedicated streaming server.

Starting this day you can win a copy of Octane Render, the world's first GPU based, un-biased, physically based renderer developed by OTOY.  Octane Render uses the graphics card to calculate all measures of light, reflection and refraction. It runs only on NVidia’s GPUs and takes advantage of the CUDA technology and it’s incompatible with other video cards by other vendors. Is a true GPU based engine, not a hybrid CPU/GPU, nor a CPU based engine that was modified with GPU acceleration. Since a CPU adds a negligible speedup to the total rendering speed, having your CPU free for other tasks while rendering with Octane Render allows you to use your system for other tasks while rendering. OctaneRender operates as a stand-alone application but also as a plug-in with popular 3D modelling software like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Smith Micro Poser and will soon be available for Autodesk Softimage, Autodesk AutoCAD, Daz3D Daz Studio, Newtek Lightwave and Maxon Cinema4D. The tightly integrated plug-ins deliver OctaneRender's  incredible speed and quality right in the viewport of the 3D application, allowing artists to interactively change lights, camera, materials, exposure, depth of field, other effects  and object placement and immediately see the rendered result with final quality. This basically means that the viewport on the screen is also the final render and it’s changing according to the artist’s changes. Some time ago we reviewed this great renderer and if you would like to know more and also see the results you can achieve with Octane Render, just check the review here.

We already announced few times the launching of the new material library here at 3D-Sphere and we really hoped that everything will go smooth and we would be able to launch it during the last month. As usually not all things were getting smooth and we have to postpone the launch of the new library to the time we would be sure that everything is prepared. However, to tell a bit more about the prepared library we can introduce the idea we are working on. The idea is actually very simple, to start a download library with materials which are used in the tutorials or can be used anywhere else. The library would be divided into two render engine sections; MentalRay and V-Ray and both of them will contain several sections for materials. We are aware that for V-Ray and as well MentalRay similar „libraries“ already exist but we want to place them under one roof and probably extend this for other renderers in the future. Together with the materials also some other downloads would be present inside the library, some related to the materials and some none.