Renderman price restructuring

[Hirazi Blue]

Pixar has announced a radical price restructuring of its RenderMan 3D and animation technology. With the upcoming version, the software will be free to non-commercial customers, and will cost $495 for individual licenses

(Quoted from here)

Or better yet: go to the appropriate page on the Renderman website directly here.

Hmmm, I wonder what spawned that move? ;)

[iamVFX]

Hmmm, I wonder what spawned that move? ;)

They felt the competition pressure from Lagoa renderer

[Hirazi Blue]

I would have thought you'd attribute it to Cycles...

[MauricioPC]

That's great for students and hobbyist. Probably great for studios as well.

[Daniel Brassard]

Yes ... finally.

[luceric]

this is pretty bad news for the people at 3Delight.

[andystopford]

It seems especially hard since they've had this kind of pricing for years (and you can use the free license commercially).

[Mathaeus]

So what is included in this 500 bucks, how many cores. Didn't find answer, yet. As far as I know, Maya connection to Renderman, compared to 3delight for Maya, that's close. That is, 3delight for Maya is a bit more complex than 3delight for SI. All in all, if someone is able to run some standard ICE setup, dot product an so - should not be a big deal to play with basic RSL, too. If this is needed, at all.
Yeah we all know Arnold replaces it, but.... imho most idiotic move would be just these five licenses and nothing more. Whatever is optimized, deadly slow CPU path tracer is deadly slow CPU path tracer. Also, if someone enjoys to use the path tracer for NPR stuff, that's problem of that person, not mine.

[angus_davidson]

this is pretty bad news for the people at 3Delight.

They need to find a way to differentiate themselves now. Possibly bringing 3Delight to more DCC's then Softimage and Maya is that step.

[Tekano]

i thought this is what atomkraft was

https://atomkraft.hk/

[MauricioPC]

this is pretty bad news for the people at 3Delight.

They need to find a way to differentiate themselves now. Possibly bringing 3Delight to more DCC's then Softimage and Maya is that step.

If they bring to 3ds Max they got themselves a nice crowd, since there isn't any connection to Renderman for Max. C4D has the Cineman connection.

[Hirazi Blue]

I really don't think branching out to new DCCs will help DNA Research much at this point. What they probably should focus on now is getting the message across, why 3Delight is still a "sexy" renderer and why it's not yet another Renderman-compliant renderer. They should, in other words, focus on what makes them stand out, regardless of the antics of Disney/Pixar.
;)

[Mathaeus]

C4D has the Cineman connection.

Well I'd say, only to some extent. It does not exports hair (or exactly, only polygons, which everything on the planet can do). Shader translator is trying to export only what C4d Material manger can (not) do. Crippled result is guarantied in advance. Just for small example, it can't modulate the environment reflection by another, UV based texture, as in C4d, UV mapping is fixed to what Maxon considers as good for user - this time, reflection mapping. And so on.
Finally, there is no ready to use lighting setup for c4d Renderman, by Grey scale gorilla or like.

Most likely, this is the end of Renderman, or beginning of end. Perhaps this renderer is not so important for Pixar anymore, at least not for their influence in 3d world. Open subdiv, as new flag of influence, is already in Maya, best chances to come to Blender very soon - which takes both extremes, the rest has to follow.

[FXDude]

Does renderman path trace? From what I found 3Dlight pathtracing is slightly slower than arnold's (tested with 2 bounces at similar visual grain /AA levels, both on 4 cores)
yet so much more accessible.. and is just as no-brainer in terms of setup. (set-it and forget it-ness)

Didn't test with heavily displaced geo, MoBlur or dof, where 3Dlight might actually surpass arnold perfomance.

Also gives access to most RenderTree Nodes Including for hair and volume

(preview update startup isn't as insanely instant though

[luceric]

yes, the new Renderman has path tracing..
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/render ... -25-years/

[angus_davidson]

I really don't think branching out to new DCCs will help DNA Research much at this point. What they probably should focus on now is getting the message across, why 3Delight is still a "sexy" renderer and why it's not yet another Renderman-compliant renderer. They should, in other words, focus on what makes them stand out, regardless of the antics of Disney/Pixar.
;)

One of their main stand out points was the free solo license / pricing in general. The new R19 is very much a big improvement on all of the things so its very much in 3delights court now. That being said both Arnold and Redshift on the EDU front will have to see how the Free non commercial licences will affect their big leads on Renderman.