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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"?
Because it doesn't cost money. It's an accident of the English language that Free as in no-cost, and free as in freedom, share the same word. In pretty much any other language, they are separate words. In French, this is the difference between "Gratuite" and "Libre"
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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.