Big and Ugly Rendering Project
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 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,[1] but its place in the history of 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
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 farms: large clusters of hundreds or thousands of computers all working in parallel. If the frames of a scene are distributed across machines, and the total sequential CPU time required is , the wall-clock duration is reduced to approximately:
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,[2] and the project's public website went live on 17 June 2004.[3] The project was the creation of Janus Kristensen, a Danish developer who would remain its primary author throughout its active history.[4]
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, 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.[1]
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.[1] 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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[5]
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.[6] 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 application framework to manage its public-facing interface, while BURP relied on a custom solution built atop BOINC's own content management system.[1] 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 beta stage, at which point users were required to agree to a new set of licensing rules aligned with Creative Commons terms.[7]
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.[8]
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:
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 DRM protected in any way.
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."[2]
- Theevan -- a subsequent short from the same artist.
- Vetri -- Danan's third major production rendered through BURP.[2]
- 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.[9][10]
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.[11] 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.[1] No official discontinuation announcement has been published by Kristensen.
How BURP works
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 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.[4]
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
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.[12]
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.[12] 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.[12]
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.[13]
The Sunflower version delivered the following technical specifications:
| Parameter | Original (2008) | Sunflower / BURP (2013) |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) | 3840 x 2160 (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 path tracer |
The project took approximately three years of spare-time development to complete.[14] 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.[13] 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.[15]
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."[16]
The release was covered by BlenderNation,[14] Slashdot,[17] and the official Blender Foundation blog,[18] 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.[19]
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
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.[1] 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.[6] 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.[11]
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-traced physically-based renderer, added in what became the project's final active configuration.[2]
Licensing
The BURP software itself is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL-3.0-or-later).[20] 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.[1]
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.[11]
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
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Big and Ugly Rendering Project. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 BURP: Big and Ugly Rendering Project. burp.renderfarming.net. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ (2008-03-26).iSGTW Link of the week - B.U.R.P. iSGTW (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Big and Ugly Rendering Project. Alchetron. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ Open Rendering Environment: Renderfarm.fi computing infrastructure. CORE (Laurea University of Applied Sciences thesis). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 (2009-09-01).What is Renderfarm.fi?. YouTube (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ BURP Forum: Beta is starting soon (Janus Kristensen). BURP (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ Blender 2.5 Extensions: Render Scripts (Renderfarm.fi). Blender Wiki (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ BURP project news feed. BOINCstats/BAM!. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ (2014-10-01).What "Uyir" is all about. Thilakanathan Studios. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 (2020-05-17).BURP: has it run out of air?. BOINCstats/BAM!. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Big Buck Bunny. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Big Buck Bunny 3D: Explore. bbb3d.renderfarming.net. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 (2013-12-19).Big Buck Bunny in 4K 3D Stereo 60fps. BlenderNation. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ Big Buck Bunny 3D: Download. bbb3d.renderfarming.net. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ (2013-12-19).BOINC-rendered movie released. BOINC Project (Isaac). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ (2013-12-21).Big Buck Bunny In 4K, 60 Fps and 3D-stereo. Slashdot. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ (2013-12-19).High Frame Rate, 4K and Stereo 3D release. Blender Foundation (peach.blender.org). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ BURP forum thread: Big Buck Bunny. BOINC Synergy. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
- ↑ Licensing of BURP and related components. BURP development wiki (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 2025-06-11.
External links
- http://burp.renderfarming.net/
- Big Buck Bunny 3D Sunflower project page (via Wayback Machine)
- Big and Ugly Rendering Project on Wikipedia
- BURP detailed statistics on BOINCstats
- BURP discussion thread on BOINC Synergy forum