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Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan
jones_supa writes: A year ago, animation studio Pixar promised its RenderMan animation and rendering suite would eventually become free for non-commercial use. This was originally scheduled to happen in the SIGGRAPH 2014 computer graphics conference, but things got delayed. Nevertheless, today Pixar is releasing the free version into the wild. Free, non-commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. This version is fully featured, without a watermark or any kind of artificial limits. Featuring Pixar's new RIS technology, RenderMan delivers extremely fast global illumination and interactive shading and lighting for artists. The software is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. In conjunction with the release, Pixar has also launched a new RenderMan Community site where users can exchange knowledge and resources, showcase their own work, share assets such as shaders and scripts, and learn about RenderMan from tutorials.
Yes, they are so strict about commercial use they don't even allow non-profit orgs to make money off it.
According to the ncr faq:
Non-commercial use? How the fuck is that "free"?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Pros use fast workstations for modelling and rough/low-res rendering. Even those machines have lots of cores and RAM and fast storage.
All the heavy-lifting however then gets handed off to a render farm - which is generally a stack of computers, also with lots of cores and ram and fast storage, and they do all the number crunching.
They can be connected in a more traditional cluster style configuration, or they can be largely independent nodes all rendering individual frames.
Rendering like this is embarrassingly parallel - you get close to a linear increase in speed with more cores thrown at the problem - i.e. 256 cores will render a job roughly twice as fast as 128 cores, all other things being equal.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
The FAQ posted by Pixar explictly allows this.
They only prohibit direct revenue.
Indirect revenue (e.g. YouTube ad fees) are permitted, but you must credit RenderMan.
And back in the 1990's we had BMRT (a free renderman clone); until they came and paid/threatened the guy to stop making the free clone available.
Sorta. Larry Gritz, the author of BMRT, went to work for Pixar and then left to start his own company, Exluna, whose main product was a Renderman competitor called Entropy. Unfortunately Pixar's lawyers jumped on Exluna and Exluna was vaporised. BMRT and Entropy were no longer available after this. Larry Gritz went to work for Nvidia after that on a GPU-accelerated renderer, I think.
There was a spinoff of 3dstudio called "GMax". It was a free version of 3dstudio without a renderer. The thing came with a really good tutorial on how to model (and how to do it effectively), texture map, animate and use inverse kinematics to animate complex models. If you can find it anywhere, that would be an excellent starting point.
This is where you learn to navigate 3D and how to use different methods layered upon each other to parametrically form a complex body out of a simple one.
Then get 3dstudio and play around with complex materials and rendering itself. Also, first contact with complex physics and particle systems.
i prefer 3DStudio over maya for learning because 3Dstudio historically came out of the "work with primitives" corner, while maya was about splines and curves to model stuff. Working with primitives (cubes, spheres and stuff) is more wysiwyg than a bunch of curves.
The free version is limited in that it cannot be connected to other renderman nodes - no networked rendering
I'm a professional animator. I use Maya, Modo, NukeX, PFTrack, VRay, Vue XStream, Harmony and the whole Adobe Suite. In software alone I have about $15K invested. My workstation, servers, etc come to an investment of around $8k so my software investment far exceeds my hardware. For batch rendering I use rendering services.
I just downloaded the free Renderman, and for someone like me, who actually makes a living doing this, this is a very good deal. Rendering software is quite non-trival and being saddled with a 2 week or even 2 month trial to determine if it is of use or even how to use it is not enough time. With the free version I can work with it and use it to generate new business. If/When I get a paying customer, I will spring for a commercial license. I pay for what I use but if it's making me money it's not an issue. The new price at $495/license is quite reasonable when compared to Arnold, VRay and other render engines that are available to the professional.
Blender is a DCC tool. RenderMan is a rendering tool. Why do I need a microphone when I have a reverb unit? Exactly.