Big and Ugly Rendering Project - Revision history

Al Piskun at 15:33, 12 June 2026

2026-06-12T15:33:54Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:33, 12 June 2026
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	== Renderfarm.fi ==		== Renderfarm.fi ==
			[[File:Laurea ammattikorkeakoulu tikkurila 250706.JPG\|thumb\|[[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]], the Finnish institution behind the Open Rendering Environment research project that produced Renderfarm.fi.]]
	[[File:Laurea~~-logo~~.~~jpg~~\|thumb~~\|right~~\|[[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]], the Finnish institution behind the Open Rendering Environment research project that produced Renderfarm.fi.]]

	Renderfarm.fi was a Finnish sister project to BURP that shared its back-end software. It was developed between 2007 and 2009 through the Open Rendering Environment (ORE) research initiative at [[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]], guided by Janus Kristensen and Julius Tuomisto, with a team of undergraduate students.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" /> An independent BURP server was set up in Finland to underpin the service.		Renderfarm.fi was a Finnish sister project to BURP that shared its back-end software. It was developed between 2007 and 2009 through the Open Rendering Environment (ORE) research initiative at [[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]], guided by Janus Kristensen and Julius Tuomisto, with a team of undergraduate students.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" /> An independent BURP server was set up in Finland to underpin the service.

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	BURP's rendering engine support evolved over the project's lifetime:		BURP's rendering engine support evolved over the project's lifetime:

	* '''YafaRay''' (June to August 2004) ~~-- the~~ original supported renderer; found inadequate and replaced.		* '''YafaRay''' (June to August 2004) The original supported renderer; found inadequate and replaced.
	* '''Blender Internal''' (from August 2004) -- Blender's built-in scanline and ray-tracing renderer; used through most of the project's active life.		* '''Blender Internal''' (from August 2004) Blender's built-in scanline and ray-tracing renderer; used through most of the project's active life.
	* '''Cycles''' (from 2019 onward, in Blender 2.81a) -- Blender's [[path tracing\|path-traced]] physically-based renderer, added in what became the project's final active configuration.<ref name="burp-homepage" />		* '''Cycles''' (from 2019 onward, in Blender 2.81a) Blender's [[path tracing\|path-traced]] physically-based renderer, added in what became the project's final active configuration.<ref name="burp-homepage" />

	=== Licensing ===		=== Licensing ===

Al Piskun: stats and images update

2026-06-12T12:48:39Z

stats and images update

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:48, 12 June 2026
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	\| screenshot = Big and Ugly Rendering Project.png		\| screenshot = Big and Ugly Rendering Project.png
	\| caption = BURP project interface		\| caption = BURP project interface
			\| description = Big and Ugly Rendering Project (BURP) is a non-commercial volunteer computing project built on BOINC, designed as an openly distributed render farm for 3D animations. It is best known for rendering the high-frame-rate 4K re-release of the Blender Foundation's open film Big Buck Bunny in 2013.

	\| status = Hibernation		\| status = Hibernation
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	\| operating system = Windows, Linux		\| operating system = Windows, Linux

			\| stats as of = {{Start date and age\|2021\|06\|22}}
			\| average performance = 382.31 GigaFLOPS
			\| active users = 161
			\| total users = 7331
			\| active hosts = 526
			\| total hosts = 13042

	\| website = {{URL\|http://burp.renderfarming.net/}}		\| website = {{URL\|http://burp.renderfarming.net/}}
	\| license = GPL-3.0-or-later		\| license = GPL-3.0-or-later
	\| description = Big and Ugly Rendering Project (BURP) is a non-commercial volunteer computing project built on BOINC, designed as an openly distributed render farm for 3D animations. It is best known for rendering the high-frame-rate 4K re-release of the Blender Foundation's open film Big Buck Bunny in 2013.
	}}		}}

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	== Background and motivation ==		== Background and motivation ==
			[[File:Blender 3.0.0 screenshot.png\|thumb\|[[Blender (software)\|Blender]], the open-source 3D creation suite that became BURP's primary supported renderer from late 2004 onward.]]
	[[File:~~Blender3D Carrot~~.~~jpg~~\|thumb~~\|right~~\|[[Blender (software)\|Blender]], the open-source 3D creation suite that became BURP's primary supported renderer from late 2004 onward.]]

	[[Rendering (computer graphics)\|Rendering]] is the process of generating a final 2D image or frame from a 3D scene description, accounting for lighting, materials, shadows, reflections, and depth. For photorealistic animation, each frame must be calculated individually, and a single high-quality frame can require anywhere from minutes to many hours of computation. A short animated film of ten minutes at 24 frames per second consists of 14,400 such frames. The resulting aggregate render time is typically measured in CPU-years, making the process practically impossible on a single workstation within any reasonable deadline.		[[Rendering (computer graphics)\|Rendering]] is the process of generating a final 2D image or frame from a 3D scene description, accounting for lighting, materials, shadows, reflections, and depth. For photorealistic animation, each frame must be calculated individually, and a single high-quality frame can require anywhere from minutes to many hours of computation. A short animated film of ten minutes at 24 frames per second consists of 14,400 such frames. The resulting aggregate render time is typically measured in CPU-years, making the process practically impossible on a single workstation within any reasonable deadline.

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	== How BURP works ==		== How BURP works ==
			[[File:BOINC logo.png\|right\|frameless\|150x150px\|The [[BOINC]] logo. BURP used the standard BOINC client-server architecture to distribute rendering work units to volunteers.]]
	[[File:~~Boinc~~ logo.png\|~~thumb~~\|The [[BOINC]] logo. BURP used the standard BOINC client-server architecture to distribute rendering work units to volunteers.]]

	=== Architecture ===		=== Architecture ===
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	* [[BOINC]]		* [[BOINC]]
	* [[BOINC projects\|List of BOINC projects]]		* [[BOINC projects\|List of BOINC projects]]
	* [[Blender (software)]]
	* [[Big Buck Bunny]]		* [[Big Buck Bunny]]
	* [[Render farm]]		* [[Render farm]]

Al Piskun: first light

2026-06-11T21:01:13Z

first light

New page

{{Infobox software
| name = Big and Ugly Rendering Project
| logo = Burp logo.png
| logo caption = BURP project logo
| screenshot = Big and Ugly Rendering Project.png
| caption = BURP project interface

| status = Hibernation
| category = 3D rendering
| compute = CPU

| developer = Janus Kristensen
| author = Janus Kristensen
| released = {{Start date and age|2004|06|17}}
| discontinued = c. 2020

| operating system = Windows, Linux

| website = {{URL|http://burp.renderfarming.net/}}
| license = GPL-3.0-or-later
| description = Big and Ugly Rendering Project (BURP) is a non-commercial volunteer computing project built on BOINC, designed as an openly distributed render farm for 3D animations. It is best known for rendering the high-frame-rate 4K re-release of the Blender Foundation's open film Big Buck Bunny in 2013.
}}

The '''Big and Ugly Rendering Project''' ('''BURP''') is a non-commercial [[volunteer computing]] project built on the [[BOINC]] (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform, conceived as a freely shared, community-operated [[render farm]] for [[3D computer graphics|3D animations]] and still images. The project was started in June 2004 by Danish developer Janus Kristensen and remained its de facto sole developer throughout its active life. Rather than pursuing a research goal, BURP pursued a creative one: to give artists access to amounts of rendering power that would be impossible on a single computer by pooling the idle CPU cycles of volunteers around the world.

BURP entered an extended period of hibernation around 2020 after years of low activity,<ref name="wikipedia-burp">{{cite web |title=Big and Ugly Rendering Project |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_and_Ugly_Rendering_Project |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> but its place in the history of [[open-source software|open-source]] creative production is secure. BURP provided the rendering infrastructure for the 2013 high-frame-rate, stereoscopic 4K re-release of ''[[Big Buck Bunny]]'', the Blender Foundation's beloved open-source animated short, with every contributing volunteer individually credited by name in the film's end titles.

== Background and motivation ==

[[File:Blender3D Carrot.jpg|thumb|right|[[Blender (software)|Blender]], the open-source 3D creation suite that became BURP's primary supported renderer from late 2004 onward.]]

[[Rendering (computer graphics)|Rendering]] is the process of generating a final 2D image or frame from a 3D scene description, accounting for lighting, materials, shadows, reflections, and depth. For photorealistic animation, each frame must be calculated individually, and a single high-quality frame can require anywhere from minutes to many hours of computation. A short animated film of ten minutes at 24 frames per second consists of 14,400 such frames. The resulting aggregate render time is typically measured in CPU-years, making the process practically impossible on a single workstation within any reasonable deadline.

Commercial animation studios address this by operating dedicated [[render farm]]s: large clusters of hundreds or thousands of computers all working in parallel. If the frames of a scene are distributed across <math>n</math> machines, and the total sequential CPU time required is <math>T_\text{total}</math>, the wall-clock duration is reduced to approximately:

:<math>T_\text{wall} \approx \frac{T_\text{total}}{n}</math>

A project requiring 1,000 CPU-hours spread across 1,000 computers could theoretically complete in a single hour. This parallelism is the economic logic behind render farms, and the social logic behind BURP: if enough volunteers donate their idle CPU time, independent artists gain access to the same order of magnitude of rendering power as professional studios, at no monetary cost.

BURP's design also incorporated a reciprocal credit model: volunteers who rendered frames for others accumulated credits that could be spent to have their own scenes rendered by the community.

== History ==

=== Founding (2004) ===

The very first test renders ran on BURP on 16 June 2004,<ref name="burp-homepage">{{cite web |title=BURP: Big and Ugly Rendering Project |url=http://burp.renderfarming.net/ |website=burp.renderfarming.net |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> and the project's public website went live on 17 June 2004.<ref name="isgtw-burp">{{cite web |title=iSGTW Link of the week - B.U.R.P |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120131213344/http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/isgtw-link-week-burp |website=iSGTW (via Wayback Machine) |date=2008-03-26 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> The project was the creation of Janus Kristensen, a Danish developer who would remain its primary author throughout its active history.<ref name="alchetron">{{cite web |title=Big and Ugly Rendering Project |url=https://alchetron.com/Big-and-Ugly-Rendering-Project |website=Alchetron |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

At launch, the only supported rendering engine was [[YafaRay]] (then known as Yafray, "Yet Another Free Raytracer"). By August 2004, it had become clear that YafaRay lacked the feature depth needed for general-purpose animation production, and development focus shifted to [[Blender (software)|Blender]], which offered a richer toolset and a significantly more compact file format that was better suited to the bandwidth constraints of distributing work units over the internet.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" />

By the end of October 2004, testing had demonstrated that distributed rendering of 3D animation was not only feasible but capable of throughput rivalling commercial render farms. The remainder of that year was spent improving the project's website frontend and data-transfer infrastructure.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" /> Through early 2005, major code overhauls were carried out for both the Linux and Windows clients, with a particular focus on estimating and improving data-transfer performance and developing a mirrored storage and distribution system for completed rendered output.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" />

=== Growth and the Renderfarm.fi connection (2007 to 2009) ===

Between 2007 and 2009, the '''Open Rendering Environment (ORE)''' project, run by [[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]] in Finland, conducted applied research into BURP's potential for use in Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises and higher education. The ORE project was developed under the guidance of Janus Kristensen and Julius Tuomisto, with a team composed largely of undergraduate students. As part of the initiative, an independent BURP server was established in Finland, operating under the domain name Renderfarm.fi.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" />

One output of this research was published as an academic thesis exploring distributed computing infrastructure for Renderfarm.fi, comparing BOINC-based volunteer computing with grid computing approaches and benchmarking their performance.<ref name="ore-thesis">{{cite web |title=Open Rendering Environment: Renderfarm.fi computing infrastructure |url=https://core.ac.uk/works/21913944 |website=CORE (Laurea University of Applied Sciences thesis) |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

Upon opening to public beta in summer 2009, Renderfarm.fi described itself as the world's first publicly distributed render farm to advocate [[Creative Commons]] licensing for submitted content.<ref name="renderfarmfi-cc">{{cite web |title=What is Renderfarm.fi? |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170521134108/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am9lYE9Tgew |website=YouTube (via Wayback Machine) |date=2009-09-01 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> The main BURP project later adopted a similar Creative Commons licensing framework for content submitted through its beta phase.

Although the two projects shared a common back-end codebase, their front-end architectures differed: Renderfarm.fi used the open-source [[Django (web framework)|Django]] web application framework to manage its public-facing interface, while BURP relied on a custom solution built atop BOINC's own content management system.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" /> Renderfarm.fi operated until late 2014 before closing.

=== Beta transition and Blender integration (2010) ===

In May 2010, BURP transitioned from its long-running alpha status into a [[Software release life cycle|beta stage]], at which point users were required to agree to a new set of licensing rules aligned with [[Creative Commons]] terms.<ref name="burp-beta">{{cite web |title=BURP Forum: Beta is starting soon (Janus Kristensen) |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032221/http://burp.renderfarming.net/forum_thread.php?id=1831 |website=BURP (via Wayback Machine) |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

A practical barrier to wider adoption had always been the process of submitting a rendering job to BURP. To address this, a script was developed that allowed artists to send sessions to BURP directly from within the Blender application through an [[XML-RPC]] interface, without leaving their 3D workspace. From the release of Blender 2.5 Beta 3, this script was available as an officially bundled add-on within Blender's main source tree.<ref name="blender-addon">{{cite web |title=Blender 2.5 Extensions: Render Scripts (Renderfarm.fi) |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100727080928/http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/Release_Notes/2.53#Render_Scripts |website=Blender Wiki (via Wayback Machine) |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

At the Assembly 2010 demoscene event, Kristensen was asked in an interview whether BURP encrypts or obscures the data it processes on volunteers' machines. His response captures the project's open philosophy:

{{quote|No. The whole system is based on open ideas. When you send files to people, they can look into the files and see what's inside. Actually that's part of what's cool about a project like this. It's community based and not closed down or [[Digital rights management|DRM]] protected in any way.|Janus Kristensen, AssemblyTV interview, August 2010<ref name="assemblytv">{{cite web |title=Renderfarm.fi, BURP and collaborative movie making on AssemblyTV |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160413041028/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaeq3oSs8qQ |website=AssemblyTV (via Wayback Machine) |date=2010-08-01 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>}}

=== Community productions (2013 to 2015) ===

In the years following the beta launch, BURP served as the rendering engine for a small number of independently produced animated short films, most notably a series of films by animator Danan (of Thilakanathan Studios):

* '''''Tripping''''' (completed before 2013) -- a comedy-thriller about a business worker's misadventures at a hotel, described by the project as "a good example of the kind of indie production that the BURP service was originally created for."<ref name="burp-homepage" />
* '''''Theevan''''' -- a subsequent short from the same artist.
* '''''Vetri''''' -- Danan's third major production rendered through BURP.<ref name="burp-homepage" />
* '''''Uyir''''' (completed 3 December 2015) -- a fourth animated short from Danan, rendered on BURP with 657 individual contributors donating a combined total of approximately 690 CPU-months of computing time.<ref name="boincstats-news">{{cite web |title=BURP project news feed |url=https://www.boincstats.com/page/projectNews/6/ |website=BOINCstats/BAM! |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref><ref name="burp-uyir">{{cite web |title=What "Uyir" is all about |url=http://thilakanathanstudios.com/2014/10/what-uyir-is-all-about/ |website=Thilakanathan Studios |date=2014-10-01 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

The ''Uyir'' figure of 690 CPU-months for a single short film illustrates the scale of compute resources BURP made accessible to independent artists. Rendered conventionally on a single machine, that volume of work would have taken nearly 58 years.

=== Hibernation (c. 2019 to present) ===

Forum activity on the BURP project dwindled through 2019, with the last substantive forum posts appearing around September of that year. By February 2020, the BOINC client was reporting scheduler failures when attempting to contact BURP, and the project's server status page was offline.<ref name="boincstats-forum">{{cite web |title=BURP: has it run out of air? |url=https://www.boincstats.com/forum/10/12425,1 |website=BOINCstats/BAM! |date=2020-05-17 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> The project homepage at burp.renderfarming.net describes the situation as "extended maintenance" and listed an expected return date of 2027 as of the most recent retrievable snapshot.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" /> No official discontinuation announcement has been published by Kristensen.

== How BURP works ==

[[File:Boinc logo.png|thumb|The [[BOINC]] logo. BURP used the standard BOINC client-server architecture to distribute rendering work units to volunteers.]]

=== Architecture ===

BURP is built on top of the standard [[BOINC]] volunteer computing framework. An artist wishing to have a scene rendered submits a Blender project file to the BURP server via the web interface or, from 2010, via the bundled Blender add-on. The BURP server divides the animation into individual frames, each of which becomes a [[Work unit (BOINC)|work unit]] dispatched to a volunteer machine through the BOINC scheduling system.

The volunteer's BOINC client downloads the Blender file, runs the Blender rendering application locally, generates the output image frame, and returns it to the BURP server. Once all frames for a session are complete, the artist can download the finished rendered output.

=== Differences from scientific BOINC projects ===

BURP's operational model differs from scientific BOINC projects in a few significant ways:

'''Variable work availability.''' Unlike scientific projects such as [[Einstein@Home]] or [[SETI@home]], which maintain a continuous queue of work derived from the project's own research datasets, BURP depended on artists actively submitting sessions. When no sessions were queued, there was no work for volunteers. This caused the BOINC client to report "Got 0 new tasks" -- a message that was confusing to new users, as the client gave no contextual explanation.<ref name="alchetron" />

'''No redundant verification.''' Scientific BOINC projects typically send the same work unit to multiple volunteers and compare results to detect computational errors. Because BURP processed openly shared Blender source files and returned image frames that could be inspected visually, the community trust model described by Kristensen served in place of automated cryptographic verification.

'''Mutual exchange rather than donation.''' While volunteers in scientific projects donate cycles purely altruistically, BURP operated a credit exchange: participants earned credits for rendering other people's content and spent those credits to have their own content rendered by the collective.

=== Data transparency ===

All files submitted to BURP passed through volunteers' machines in plaintext, with no encryption or obfuscation. This was a deliberate design choice rather than an oversight, reflecting the Creative Commons ethos underpinning the project. Content submitted to BURP was required to be licensed under open terms compatible with this model.

== ''Big Buck Bunny'' ==

[[File:Big.Buck.Bunny.-.Opening.Screen.png|thumb|Opening frame of ''Big Buck Bunny'' (2008), the Blender Foundation's most widely distributed open-source animated short film, and the centrepiece of BURP's most celebrated project.]]

=== Background: the original film ===

''[[Big Buck Bunny]]'' (internally code-named Project Peach) is a 2008 animated comedy short film produced by the [[Blender Institute]], a division of the [[Blender Foundation]], directed by Sacha Goedegebure and produced by Ton Roosendaal. The ten-minute film follows a large, gentle rabbit who encounters three bullying rodents in a forest and ultimately outwits them using an elaborate series of slapstick traps. The film had its world premiere on 10 April 2008 at Cinema Studio in Amsterdam, with a budget of approximately €150,000.<ref name="bbb-wikipedia">{{cite web |title=Big Buck Bunny |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

Developed as a showcase for advancements in Blender and open-source production pipelines, the film was made entirely using free and open-source software and released under the [[Creative Commons Attribution]] 3.0 license. Both the final film and all production data including animation files, character rigs, and textures were published freely for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute.<ref name="bbb-wikipedia" /> ''Big Buck Bunny'' has since become one of the most widely distributed test files in the history of video technology, routinely used by hardware manufacturers, video codec developers, and streaming platforms to assess playback quality.<ref name="bbb-wikipedia" />

=== The Sunflower re-render project ===

The original 2008 release was produced in standard high definition (1920 x 1080 pixels) at 24 frames per second, the conventional cinema standard of the time. In the years that followed, Janus Kristensen undertook a personal project to re-render the film at specifications far exceeding the original, using BURP's volunteer network as the rendering engine. Kristensen codenamed this project '''Sunflower'''.<ref name="bbb3d-explore">{{cite web |title=Big Buck Bunny 3D: Explore |url=http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/explore.html |website=bbb3d.renderfarming.net |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

The Sunflower version delivered the following technical specifications:

{| class="wikitable"
! Parameter !! Original (2008) !! Sunflower / BURP (2013)
|-
| Resolution || 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) || 3840 x 2160 ([[4K resolution|4K UHD]])
|-
| Frame rate || 24 fps || 60 fps
|-
| Stereoscopy || None (flat 2D) || Stereoscopic 3D (left and right eye)
|-
| HDR lighting || No || Yes (HDRI)
|-
| Rendering || Blender Internal || [[Cycles (render engine)|Cycles]] path tracer
|}

The project took approximately three years of spare-time development to complete.<ref name="blendernation-bbb">{{cite web |title=Big Buck Bunny in 4K 3D Stereo 60fps |url=https://www.blendernation.com/2013/12/19/big-buck-bunny-in-4k-3d-stereo-60fps/ |website=BlenderNation |date=2013-12-19 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> Converting the original film to stereoscopic 3D was particularly demanding: every scene had to be modified individually to function correctly in stereo, because the original compositions had been created for flat 2D projection. Similarly, the increase from 24 to 60 frames per second required corresponding changes to many animations to prevent motion artefacts at the higher frame rate.

The data volume of the finished render is substantial. A typical raw EXR frame from the project ranges from 20 to 40 megabytes per eye. A viewer watching the 60 fps stereoscopic version therefore sees approximately 3 gigabytes of image data stream past each second.<ref name="bbb3d-explore" /> The full output was released under the [[Creative Commons Attribution]] 3.0 license, with all source files including Blender project files, EXR frames, PNG stills, and MP4 encodes made freely available for download.<ref name="bbb3d-download">{{cite web |title=Big Buck Bunny 3D: Download |url=http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/download.html |website=bbb3d.renderfarming.net |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

=== Announcement and reception ===

The Sunflower version was completed and announced on 19 December 2013. David Anderson, the creator of BOINC at the University of California, Berkeley, posted the news to the official BOINC message board: "The animated short Big Buck Bunny has been released in hi-res (4K x 2K), high frame rate (60 FPS) and stereo. The rendering was done using BOINC by the Big and Ugly Rendering Project."<ref name="boinc-news">{{cite web |title=BOINC-rendered movie released |url=https://isaac.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=8792 |website=BOINC Project (Isaac) |date=2013-12-19 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

The release was covered by BlenderNation,<ref name="blendernation-bbb" /> Slashdot,<ref name="slashdot-bbb">{{cite web |title=Big Buck Bunny In 4K, 60 Fps and 3D-stereo |url=https://slashdot.org/story/13/12/21/199240/big-buck-bunny-in-4k-60-fps-and-3d-stereo |website=Slashdot |date=2013-12-21 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> and the official Blender Foundation blog,<ref name="peach-release">{{cite web |title=High Frame Rate, 4K and Stereo 3D release |url=https://peach.blender.org/2013/12/high-frame-rate-4k-and-stereo-3d-release/ |website=Blender Foundation (peach.blender.org) |date=2013-12-19 |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> and attracted wide attention in the open-source and 3D graphics communities. The Sunflower release also served as a timing test for display technology: at the time of release, playing the full stereoscopic 60 fps 4K stream without dropped frames posed a meaningful challenge to consumer hardware.

=== Volunteer credits ===

BOINC volunteers who contributed CPU cycles to the ''Big Buck Bunny'' rendering work were individually acknowledged in the film's end titles. The credit block reads: "A Very Special Thanks To All of the Collaborative Online Renderfarm Contributors..." Each volunteer was asked whether they wished to be listed under their real name or their BOINC username.<ref name="boinc-synergy-forum">{{cite web |title=BURP forum thread: Big Buck Bunny |url=https://boincsynergy.ca/forum/viewtopic.php?t=89 |website=BOINC Synergy |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref>

This personal acknowledgement was notable in the context of volunteer computing, where contributors typically receive no recognition beyond credits on a statistics leaderboard. Being named in the end titles of a Blender Foundation film distributed globally under a Creative Commons license represented a tangible and lasting form of recognition for the participants.

== Renderfarm.fi ==

[[File:Laurea-logo.jpg|thumb|right|[[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]], the Finnish institution behind the Open Rendering Environment research project that produced Renderfarm.fi.]]

Renderfarm.fi was a Finnish sister project to BURP that shared its back-end software. It was developed between 2007 and 2009 through the Open Rendering Environment (ORE) research initiative at [[Laurea University of Applied Sciences]], guided by Janus Kristensen and Julius Tuomisto, with a team of undergraduate students.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" /> An independent BURP server was set up in Finland to underpin the service.

Renderfarm.fi opened to public beta in summer 2009, positioning itself as the world's first publicly distributed render farm requiring submitted content to be licensed under Creative Commons terms.<ref name="renderfarmfi-cc" /> Unlike BURP's custom interface, Renderfarm.fi used the Django web framework to provide its public frontend, and it cultivated an active presence in the Blender creative community. The project attracted consistent work from artists while it operated.

Renderfarm.fi closed in late 2014. The closure was lamented within the BOINC volunteer community, with participants on the BOINCstats forum noting that the project had maintained a reliable supply of rendering work in a way that the original BURP project sometimes struggled to match due to the intermittent nature of session submissions.<ref name="boincstats-forum" />

== Technical details ==

=== Rendering engines ===

BURP's rendering engine support evolved over the project's lifetime:

* '''YafaRay''' (June to August 2004) -- the original supported renderer; found inadequate and replaced.
* '''Blender Internal''' (from August 2004) -- Blender's built-in scanline and ray-tracing renderer; used through most of the project's active life.
* '''Cycles''' (from 2019 onward, in Blender 2.81a) -- Blender's [[path tracing|path-traced]] physically-based renderer, added in what became the project's final active configuration.<ref name="burp-homepage" />

=== Licensing ===

The BURP software itself is distributed under the [[GNU General Public License]] version 3 (GPL-3.0-or-later).<ref name="burp-license">{{cite web |title=Licensing of BURP and related components |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120510054504/http://development.burp.renderfarming.net/projects/burp/wiki/How_to_download_the_code |website=BURP development wiki (via Wayback Machine) |access-date=2025-06-11}}</ref> Content submitted to BURP during the beta phase was required to be compatible with Creative Commons licensing.

=== Operating systems ===

BURP's client application was available for Windows and Linux. The project's use of Blender as its rendering engine meant it could theoretically support macOS as well, though only Windows and Linux were officially maintained as BOINC application targets.

=== Naming ===

One point of potential confusion noted in documentation for the project is that the name "BURP" refers both to the BOINC project (the volunteer computing service) and to the underlying back-end software, which could be and was run independently on other servers such as Renderfarm.fi. Care is therefore needed when reading historical documentation to determine which sense of the name is in use.<ref name="wikipedia-burp" />

== Community and reception ==

Within the BOINC volunteer computing community, BURP occupied an unusual niche. While the overwhelming majority of BOINC projects directed computing power toward scientific research, BURP directed it toward creative production. This made it attractive to a somewhat different type of volunteer: people interested in open-source creative culture, animation, and 3D graphics, in addition to those already participating in science-oriented projects.

The project's dependency on artist submissions for work availability meant the experience of volunteering for BURP could be unpredictable. During periods when no sessions were queued, volunteers' machines sat idle on the project, occasionally prompting new users to assume the project was broken. Despite this friction, BURP retained a loyal following over many years, with longtime participants on BOINCstats describing it as a favourite project.<ref name="boincstats-forum" />

The Sunflower re-render of ''Big Buck Bunny'' demonstrated something not previously achieved in the BOINC ecosystem: a globally distributed volunteer network completing a major creative production at cinema-grade technical specifications. At the time of release, 4K at 60 fps stereoscopic 3D was ahead of what most commercial studios were delivering to consumer audiences, making the result a genuine technical landmark as well as a community achievement.

== See also ==

* [[BOINC]]
* [[BOINC projects|List of BOINC projects]]
* [[Blender (software)]]
* [[Big Buck Bunny]]
* [[Render farm]]
* [[Creative Commons]]
* [[SETI@home]]
* [[World Community Grid]]

== References ==

{{Reflist}}

== External links ==

* {{URL|http://burp.renderfarming.net/|BURP official website}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160412011356/http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/ Big Buck Bunny 3D Sunflower project page] (via Wayback Machine)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_and_Ugly_Rendering_Project Big and Ugly Rendering Project] on Wikipedia
* [https://www.boincstats.com/stats/6/project/detail BURP detailed statistics] on BOINCstats
* [https://boincsynergy.great-site.net/viewtopic.php?t=89 BURP discussion thread] on BOINC Synergy forum

[[Category:BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Completed BOINC projects]]
[[Category:3D rendering software]]
[[Category:Free software]]
[[Category:Volunteer computing]]
[[Category:Open-source culture]]