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Renderman Gets Blender Integration

Posted by timothy on from the half-man-half-blender dept.

jones_supa writes: Now that Renderman has been available for free for non-commercial use for a while, there has been many requests for integration with Blender. An initiative spearheaded by Pixar now presents the first Blender to Renderman plugin. With the release of PRMan 20, a small group of developers headed by Brian Savery of Pixar have been working on support for using Renderman and Blender together. The plugin is still in early alpha but has had many great developments in the last few weeks. The source code is available in GitHub.

31 comments

  1. Yeah! by bkgoodman · · Score: 0

    A "free" Renderman was a bit limited without a decent "free" front-end. Been waiting on trying Renderman for Blender integration!

    1. Re:Yeah! by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      A free Renderman isn't really useful to Blender users except for the Whizbang "Yay we're using otherwise expensive software" bragging rights. The comments on the article for Blendernation are telling. "No GPU? Cycles is faster with a GPU than PRMan on the CPU." This is true. In fact PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers for almost a decade let alone stripped down hobbyist renderers. Yes Pixar uses, yes ILM uses it but outside of ILM and Pixar applications PRMan is poorly suited for what most smaller boutique studios do let alone what a hobbyist does. A hobbyist would read comments in Cinefex magazine with wonderment when a VFX Supervisor says that Iron Man was the first film where ILM used area lights or Cars one of the first films where PRman did raytracing in any substantial way.

      Whatever you're rendering, you probably aren't benefiting from PRMan's really distinguishing features if you're using blender.

    2. Re:Yeah! by Chris+Johnson · · Score: 0

      Because they are losing money and the tech equivalent of Enron?

    3. Re:Yeah! by infolation · · Score: 2

      Whatever you're rendering, you probably aren't benefiting from PRMan's really distinguishing features if you're using blender.

      For the average Blender-user, that's probably true, but certainly not because

      PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers for almost a decade

      ... since most Blender-users are not going to be rendering multi-billion polygon scenes with massive displacement, instancing, complex shader networks, complex AOV output and custom-written Renderman shaders.

      Sorry, but your statement is just completely wrong!

      You mean the VFX companies who made Avengers: Age of Ultron, Cinderella, Ex Machina, Fast and Furious 7, Inside Out, Jupiter Ascending, Jurassic World, Mad Max: Fury Road, Seventh Son, Ted 2 and Tomorrowland thought they'd chose an "incredibly slow" production renderer, rather than Arnold? Most people think of the REYES rendering approach as being at the core of RenderMan when thinking of imagery produced by Pixar's RenderMan, and although this has been historically true, RenderMan has been a hybrid renderer for some time now.

      For the record, Renderman now uses RIS: Arnold-style path-tracing as well as bidirectional path tracing.

    4. Re:Yeah! by Jack_the_Tripper · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure the original renderman exporter code predates Cycles, back when the blender internal renderer was (and still is) kind of iffy for production usage without a couple coders sitting in the same studio as the artists using it -- pretty much the 'production environment' of the first few Blender Institute open movie projects. So these Pixar peeps dusted off the old code (which, IIRC, was based around 3Delight) and updated it to work better with PRMan so hobbyists can learn/play with their 'free' renderer and dream of how they are learning the skills to help them get a jig working on a multi-bazillion dollar blockbuster movie. Also, to be fair, Cycles with OSL (Open Shading Language) isn't GPU accelerated so if you want a programmable shader pipeline then they both are going to be running on the CPU.

    5. Re:Yeah! by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      This is true. In fact PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers

      I thought it has been very fast at what it was designed to do, and perhaps slower on what those other production renderers were designed to do, which often wasn't stuff that Pixar was interested in.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    6. Re:Yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cars one of the first films where PRman did raytracing in any substantial way

      Would that be because before PRman did raytracing, they had to resort to using BMRT - before they sued to make it disappear?

    7. Re:Yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Trick questions; it isn't, and they aren't. Why is iOS so inflexible, and why is the Windows phone app store so empty?

    8. Re:Yeah! by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      You mean the VFX companies thought they'd chose an "incredibly slow" production renderer, rather than Arnold?

      RenderMan has been a hybrid renderer for some time now

      Yes I am saying that. There are a couple reasons for that. For one thing there is a lot of inertia in the industry and for good reason. You don't want to move from a tool that you know works, has worked on dozens of features previously and adopt something which might not work. Arnold is only creeping into production. Render TDs aren't familiar with raytracing in general. Lighting TDs are used to cheating everything. Only 1 production renderer historically had been the renderer of choice for feature film work (PRMan) so only it had gotten the AOVs, custom shaders, flexible scene graph manipulation and such that feature film teams want. So your choice before Arnold was essentially "We can take a mostly ready renderer like say Arnold, Brazil or Vray and hammer it into what we want or we can keep using PRMan which does everything we want albeit slowly." The "right" choice was PRMan. A few groups who didn't have the same constraints such as ILM's rogue and digimatte departments went with raytracers (for instance the opening forest shot of Avatar is a Brazil shot) also DD's commercial division was mostly Vray so when Tron came along they had a moment of power and sort of injected Vray on to Digital Domain at large (which is in my opinion why Vray suddenly started getting good focused development towards being a usable feature production renderer). And of course Arnold re-emerged after 12 years of underground development in SPI's basement. So DD and Sony did decide to put in the herculean effort to take a promising production raytracer and turn it into a competitive production renderer.

      But as I'm sure you know speed isn't everything. Prman is exactly as you say all about:

      ... since most Blender-users are not going to be rendering multi-billion polygon scenes with massive displacement, instancing, complex shader networks, complex AOV output and custom-written Renderman shaders.

      Arnold years ago: too immature to do any of that.
      Brazil: massive displacement was extremely glitchy until briefly before it was acquired and killed. It also had no implicit hair spline rendering.
      Vray: Had nobody using it in features so as a result it was back-asswords for feature production with feedback and bug reports only coming from Arch-Viz artists. It also didn't have the stability or capabilities of handling multi-billion poly scenes at the time
      .
      And none of the above had something like RIB.

      So while they were all faster, if you can't rely on it for every shot it's a bad choice. You don't want to get 90% of the way into a shot and then have the renderer shit the bed and have to change renderers and redo all of your work on the shot. Renderman has always been spectacularly reliable, fast? No. Reliable, absolutely.

      What finally happened though was that Arnold popped up out of stealth maturation in SPI's pipeline and made a mockery of Renderman's performance. More and more effects were raytraced and Renderman's raytracer was a kludgy tacked on piece of shit. Arnold overcame the deficiencies of Vray and Brazil for features and implemented all of the stuff that feature films want: bullet proof displacement, solid instancing, implicit hair shapes, AOVs, a RIB like scene graph with ASS plus it brought the speed and artist friendly workflow of something like Brazil or Vray.

      So yes, the renderman team went back to the drawing board and turned renderman into a path tracer before they lost the entire market. But it's only been in a stable release availability for 2 years, compared to the optimization and tuning that Arnold has had going on for well over a decade. Renderman is catching up but it's definitely on defense and trying to catch up.

      But all of that is irrelevant for Blender users even now you don't really

  2. okay, but does it blen... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... nevermind, too easy.

    1. Re:okay, but does it blen... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      when it blends it rends

  3. "..there has been many.." by Tehrasha · · Score: 1

    Was excited about the subject matter, but reading that, made my teeth hurt.

    1. Re:"..there has been many.." by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Uhh...yeah. Sorry about that. Here, have a Snickers.

      -- submitter

    2. Re:"..there has been many.." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seeing a comma between subject and predicate, makes my perineum hurt.

  4. Blenderman gets Rendered by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    EOM

  5. Renderman? by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 1

    Is Renderman a superhero who can separate meat from bones?

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    1. Re:Renderman? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      No - Renderman is the dude in charge of the Enlightenment project.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    2. Re:Renderman? by aNonnyMouseCowered · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, Renderman is the nemesis of Blenderman. He morphs into pixels the rays from Blenderman's polyguns.

  6. What I would really like to see available by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is some of the tools used by BUF Compagnie in France. They are the REAL pioneers in CGI.

    1. Re:What I would really like to see available by infolation · · Score: 1

      The real pioneer in CG (at least in terms of rendering) is Ed Catmull.

      In case you didn't realise he was one of the original team who developed Renderman, and is still instrumental to keeping it a viable production renderer.

    2. Re:What I would really like to see available by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And instrumental in keeping wages depressed.

    3. Re:What I would really like to see available by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Look at some of the stuff BUF did during the 80's, and early 90's before everyone else caught up. Nobody was producing CGI anywhere close to the detail and realism that BUF had. Not even Ed Catmull.

  7. I dub thee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Blenderman

  8. Someone break the good news to this poor bastard! by BringMyShuttle · · Score: 1

    http://blendertorenderman.blog...

  9. Renderman on YouTube by AndyKron · · Score: 1

    I take it I couldn't use Renderman for YouTube videos because that would be commercial use?

    1. Re: Renderman on YouTube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually that is covered in the FAQ, where it says you cannot make money directly from the imagery. You can still make money from ads, AFAIK because it's not using imagery from the non commercial license.

  10. wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't know anything about 3D art work design but that was one depressing as fuck read.

    1. Re: wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was depressing as fuck to write.....

  11. 3DS Max? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Still not available for 3DS Max.

    You would have thought that would have been the first thing they'd make it available for.