Big and Ugly Rendering Project - History

History

The BURP project was originally started by Danish national Janus Kristensen. The main BURP website went online on 17 June 2004. At that time the only supported renderer was Yafray and the website was very basic. In August that year it became clear that Yafray was not the best choice, and focus was shifted towards Blender - a renderer with more features and a compact file format.

By the end of October enough tests had been done to show that not only is the distributed rendering of 3D animations possible, it can achieve performance that rivals many commercial render farms. The current trend of increasing network bandwidth throughout the world will make it even more powerful. The rest of 2004 was used to improve and develop the website frontend for the system.

Until May 2005 the Linux and Windows clients got major code overhauls and loads of tests were done to estimate and improve performance of several aspects of the data transfer systems. Most importantly, code for a mirrored storage and distribution system for the rendered output started to emerge.

In May 2010 the project entered a beta stage, requiring users to agree to a new set of licensing rules based on the Creative Commons.

Although many people have contributed to the source code since the start of the project, the majority of the BURP code base remains authored by Janus Kristensen, who continues as the head developer of the software.

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