We spent the last 2 years quietly working in the background to deliver a new standard for render farm platforms. Our website has been rebuilt from scratch to provide a prettier, smoother and more stable experience to our growing userbase. This new foundation will also help us deliver more features and ensure we provide best-in-class experiences.
This refresh also expands our application support - we now support Cinema 4D, Blender and Houdini!
Why change?
Our previous codebase has been there since day 1 - it's gotten our render farm quite far, but its age was starting to show. New features were becoming harder to implement, and much of day to day effort was spent on keeping things together and working, rather than on improving our underlying platform.
We've improved our brand identity over the years but the core design remained the same since the start. We had an opportunity to rethink the look and feel of our website, and we used that chance to also modernize our web-related codebase.
What's new?
Our brand new design keeps a lot of the elements (and even layouts) of our previous website but with a modern twist. Things are more consistent, more intentional, and more driven by user experience principles than before. We fought hard to keep all content on the same pages as it used to be, so your memory should still roughly match up with reality.
We united our Blender and Cinema 4D platforms into just one page, which means we no longer have a separate Blender site. We also merged the two colorschemes into one, so if you came from the Blender site we apologize if things look a bit more colorful than you're used to.
Design highlights
How does it work?
What once was
Our previous website used a PHP backend and various scripting implementations for client-side interactions, ranging from jQuery to various scripts we've accrued over the years. It worked, but there was usually about 5 ways to do any single thing - and to do it well you'd have to invent a 6th one. We didn't like the inconsistencies this caused everywhere.
The frontend was similarly fragmented - it originally used hand-rolled CSS, then adopted some Bootstrap for some of the newer bits. The Bootstrap parts were a lot nicer to work with, but they made up less than 10% of our total pages, and even then you had to compete with the default site-wide styling.
What will now be
The new implementation has a brand-new, much faster and much more secure PHP backend. The scripting is now constrained into two major groups, with very little hand-rolled JavaScript: whenever possible, we call back to the server to do any computation or retrieve data using HTMX. Whenever interactions are purely client side we fall back to Alpine.js for its minimal reactivity implementation. Pretty much all of what used to be hand-rolled JavaScript is now in one of those two groups, which makes maintenance infinitely easier.
Our frontend now uses Tailwind for everything, with a very small set of custom utilities. This is trivial to maintain in comparison, and by adopting a component-first mentality for the rest of our codebase we get most of the advantages that come from JSX in a purely PHP environment.
What this means for You
The website should feel new but familiar. It is faster, more efficient, and more reliable than ever, letting you work with even more confidence. We are always trying to provide the absolute best-in-class for all of our products, so look out for even more improvements in the future! Feel free to use the "Provide feedback" options on all pages in case you notice something weird.
Happy rendering!
