Pixar To Give Away 3D RenderMan Software

nairnr sends this news from the BBC: 'The 3D rendering software behind films such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter is to be given away free for non-commercial use. RenderMan, which is developed by Pixar, has faced increased competition from rival animation rendering programmes such as VRay and Arnold. Although Pixar, which is owned by Disney, produces its own films, it licenses RenderMan to rival studios. In a statement, the firm said it would release a free version of RenderMan "without any functional limitations, watermarking, or time restrictions." "Non-commercial RenderMan will be freely available for students, institutions, researchers, developers, and for personal use," it added.'

Comments

there is some evil in this

[alen]

it's disney
the same company that makes me pay for ESPN even though i never watch it

Re:there is some evil in this

[phrostie]

look up the history of BMRT

I'd be happy if they gave that back.

Re:there is some evil in this

[Charliemopps]

It's just good talent retention. If your software is free to learn on... people will learn on it. Which increases your talent pool. Most of the Apple fanboys out there now are such because, when they were in highschool, apple was the only computer in the school... and therefor the only computer they had access to. You use what you know. It worked for Apple, it will work for Pixar... but kind of in reverse.

Re:there is some evil in this

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Oh, come on. They just want to kill off 3Delight or something like that.

Re:there is some evil in this

[alen]

disney says you have to put ESPN into the basic cable tier along with the three dozen other channels on it. i watch sports, but ESPN is crap. it's either talk shows or niche sports like drag racing

Re:there is some evil in this

[just_another_sean]

Not to mention that they were one of the first to pull the "you can't access our online content because your ISP doesn't pay us to let you access it" *. F Disney and ESPN.

* See the section on Criticism

Re:there is some evil in this

[Penguinisto]

Oh, come on. They just want to kill off 3Delight or something like that.

You're close - they likely want to kill off licensing money for 3Delight (you can get the engine yourself and use it for free). For instance, these guys license 3Delight as the render engine inside the DAZ Studio product, as do many other hobbyist and lower-end toolsets. They pay quite a bit for the privilege.

There's a decent amount of money to be made not by selling the engine as a product, but by licensing it out to other software houses, much like they licensed out the Unreal or Quake game engines. Making and maintaining a complex CG engine (rendering, game physics, subdivision, etc) is programmatically a PITA, and it's easier to use an existing wheel than to just re-invent it.

Re:there is some evil in this

[Penguinisto]

yes Disney MAKES you pay for cable.

I think his point is this: Try getting cable or sat television without a Disney-owned channel on it.

Sure, you can cut the cable and all, but it's kind of funny that Disney has insinuated themselves that damned deeply into the entertainment industry, no?

Think of it as not being able to get municipal water without being forced to have Brawndo pumped into the pipes at regular intervals throughout the day. I mean, sure you can drill a well and get your own water and all, but...

Re:there is some evil in this

[Will.Woodhull]

This is a measure of Blender's success as FOSS. I hadn't expected this kind of reaction for a couple more years, but Blender has been developing a lot faster than I had thought it would.

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[vux984]

Pretty sure you reading it wrong. You can get a copy of it for free as a developer; presumably to play with it, maybe develop free plugins for it etc.

I certainly don't read it as being free for you to make animation for commerial apps. (regular paid apps, freemium, or ad supported)

Recruiting Tool

[rodrigoandrade]

This is Disney we're talking about here.

And TNSTAAFL.

They'll obviously use it as a recruiting tool.

1. Release tool
2. Watch amateur animations spring up online
3. Hire amateurs who create awesome animations
4. Save on training costs
5. Profit

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[Registered Coward v2]

"Non-commercial RenderMan will be freely available for ... developers...," it added.'

Forget the others; they're basically saying anyone not making commercial feature films can use it for free -- which means small software developers can now create excellent animation sequences for free, as long as they can actually do decent animation. This could usher in Pixar-level animation in App-style games, which would be significantly better than the current options.

Here we come, Bendy Luxo apps!

If I read their pricing schedule correctly a commercial license is only $495; so someone could create some animation and later buy a license at a reasonable price if they decide to do a commercial release.

Renderman old news, Presto new news

[clawsoon]

It might be that Pixar considers rendering old news, considering what they've come up with for animators:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/watch-a-rare-demo-of-pixars-animation-system-presto-98099.html

If you're not familiar with computer animation, that might not seem like much. To the animators where I work, though, it induced a weird combination of frenzy (as they lusted after it) and depression (once they re-opened the scenes they were working on in Maya). The rest of the industry has to spend hours rendering (in Renderman, or Vray, or whatever) to get a result that Pixar is now creating in-house in real time.

Re:Renderman old news, Presto new news

[Anonymous Coward]

Presto is not even directly related to rendering.

In terms of rendering, try making an architectural visualization with PRman. Try doing product shots. Try doing anything besides exactly what it was built to do within the confines of Pixar. There's a reason other rendering tools exist, and price alone is not it. Keep in mind that PRMan couldn't even do accurate reflections for the longest of times, and the general sentiment at the time was that it didn't need to be able to anyway, as few things in the movies it was being used for had reflective surfaces, and where they did, they could always find a work-around or use another tool. It didn't take very long for them to add a raytracing subsystem, though.

That said, rendering is more or less old news, simply because the computational power now exists to render things using physically accurate equations within a reasonable time frame without having to resort to cheats like photon mapping, render cache, etc. (even if many still opt to do so), and flexible enough to let artists bend the rules of physics where they feel it delivers a better aesthetic result. Moreover, this is within reach of prosumer budgets. Anybody serious enough can buy a decent graphics card, and VRay for [choice of animation package here], and off they go. There haven't been particularly great advances in core rendering technology shown off at, for example, Siggraph or EuroGraphics for a while now. Most of it is just about speeding up the existing computations a little bit more, or finding somewhat more efficient ways to do X, where X is usually a somewhat obscure portion of rendering that might not even be related to the visual at all, but e.g. transfer of properties, sound propagation, and others). If anything, there appears to be more research in Non-Photorealistic Rendering than there is in photorealistic.

So if all rendering is practically equal, where do you get artists to focus? On modeling tools, animations tools, rigging tools, etc. All the actual artist-side-of-things which can interface with whatever renderer they want (as long as they use reasonably agnostic shaders); which are exactly the areas where Pixar's tools shine.

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[gmueckl]

The high end is where RenderMan shines. This is a tool for experts. The studios that use RenderMan pay people to become experts in very specific domains (modeling, shading and lighting are separate domains for these people) and this software has been the ultimate tool for the shading and lighting stages for the last 2 decades.

However, as the summary notes, Arnold is the new shooting star among production renderers. It's a completely different beast - different basic algorithms which imply different ways of dealing with it, but at the benefit that the results usually obey the laws of physics without further ado. RenderMan was never designed to work that way, yet this is what the VFX industry moves towards.

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's a feature disparity. Blender is mostly polygon oriented, but PRMan rather likes to chew on smooth patches. Blender's NURBS features are of lackluster quality, though, so you're basically left only with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces as the lowest common denominator. It's not that polygons wouldn't work, but you'd be missing on some of the coolest features of PRMan - or you'd have to make some geometry transformers of your own for the exporter. It's like running a car's engine on idle all the time. (Also, PRMan loves humongously complex scenes, which Blender is probably unable to provide. Again, you're running your engine on idle.)

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[Anonymous Coward]

RenderMan is primarily a rendering interface specification and a shading language definition. For convenience, implementations are also called RenderMan.
Pixar's own implementation and toolset (previously called Photorealistic RenderMan/PRMan and RenderMan Studio Tools) is by far the most successful. There are multiple other software implementations of RenderMan: commercial (3Delight) and open-source (Pixie, Aqsis). Also some dead ones (RenderDotC, BMRT).
Finally, there are renderers that have borrowed the concept and a lot of ideas from it (Houdini's integrated Mantra renderer).

An Intoduction To Presto

[westlake]

Presto is Pixar's proprietary, fully featured, animation package. Besides the main interactive application, Presto is built on top of a rich set of reusable libraries. The application supports integrated workflows for a variety of feature film departments including rigging, layout, animation and simulation. It also provides built in media playback and asset management tools.

For the purposes of this course, we will mainly discuss Presto's Execution System. We will use two common disciplines, rigging and animation, to illustrate how the system works.

One of the challenges in Presto is its integrated architecture. In a single session, the user may wish to animate or do some rigging or run a sim or all three without an explicit context switch. Some of these tasks do not lend themselves well to a multithreading environment, and yet must coexist seamlessly with all features of the application.

Presto Execution System: An Asynchronous Computation Engine for Animation

[George ElKoura, Pixar Animation Studios, July 24, 2013]

I'll get back at them!

[Anonymous Coward]

I plan on using this software to make a movie like "Cars" only called "Dildoes".

Then there's my porn movie the "Awesomes" and you guess it, it'll be like the "Incredibles."

Oh, and wait till you see MY version of Toy Story - Oh! There WILL be toys!!

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[PRMan]

I am most assuredly NOT linkable as a shared library! ;)

Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Ah, the ancient trick with registering yourself under a relevant nick ten years before I make a comment? Like I'm going to fall for that!