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Renderman Free Non Commercial

Renderman is finally free for non commercial use! Anyone looking forward to trying it out? Also what are your thoughts on how this might affect Vray or Arnold?


http://renderman.pixar.com/view/non-commercial-renderman

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  • [Deleted User]
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    [Deleted User] polycounter lvl 3
    Chromogen wrote: »
    Also what are your thoughts on how this might affect Vray or Arnold?

    This will not affect them. On the other hand THIS will affect all of them in a hard way.
  • DireWolf
    Very interesting! The road of learning just never ends.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    I expect to see a lot more realtime rendering engines in the future, even if it's not exactly real time, or lower resolution, getting the same graphics and lighting in seconds vs hundreds of hours really speeds up iteration. I'm sure directors/actors would love being able to see mocap actors instantly skinned and in a digital world instead of in front of a green screen and waiting weeks. Hopefully it'll mean VFX will be "on the set" with the directors and actors, and better movies/CG.
  • tadpole3159
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    tadpole3159 polycounter lvl 12
    mantragora wrote: »
    This will not affect them. On the other hand THIS will affect all of them in a hard way.
    Game engines are designed to make games, you want real time renderers that plug right into max and use he same high quality shaders that your offline renderer supports, and it's already available.
    http://youtu.be/nnaz8q6FLCk
    you can see peter Jackson using similar tech when he was making the hobbit films. Same for that avatar film
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Those realtime vray renders are so noisy, and raw GPU power is only improving so much a year, I doubt that's going to be the long term solution. People are already using UE4 for a ton of architectural visualization, even though they could use Vray RT for realtime interaction with clients.
  • DireWolf
    Not a surprising move considering UE4 is completely free for presentation.

    Now my learning path seems uncertain. Been happily playing with Clarisse for a few weeks and now Pixar came along and throw us a new toy :O Will definitely play with it but I'll be trying to master Clarisse for now.
  • tadpole3159
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    tadpole3159 polycounter lvl 12
    ZacD wrote: »
    Those realtime vray renders are so noisy, and raw GPU power is only improving so much a year, I doubt that's going to be the long term solution. People are already using UE4 for a ton of architectural visualization, even though they could use Vray RT for realtime interaction with clients.

    I'm pretty sure Vray RT uses the GPU same as a game engine. The chaos group posted this a few days ago, its getting less noisy all the time.
    [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihyRybQmmWc[/ame]

    and when its time to show it off to a client just switch to Vray and press render.

    After seeing koola's work in unreal I can certainly see potential but the best you can do is a 1080p beauty pass in some sort of video format. if your doing films your going to want to set up compositions in nuke with 32 bit depth and what not

    Personally I don't see unreal adding such options to there game engine. I would want them to either, you want to keep it focused on games. Maybe some sort of film based spin off might be the way to go though
  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter
    this is where i think you are wrong, pixar and disney removed the need for compositing in the post with cars2 and the following movies.
    These noise based renderes and ages taking offline renderers are just a step inbetween to me.
    Cryengine has their own film based spinoff and i guess this is where we are heading.
    For TV, animated series already a lot of productions switched to good enough realtime solutions, because of the fast turnaround times.
  • tadpole3159
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    tadpole3159 polycounter lvl 12
    Yea same. taking weeks to render something total crap, your just wasting time and money while your waiting for a PC to get its arse into gear and finish your picture. If your filming something you want to see exactly what your shooting right in front of you.
    Personally I recon what ever makes raytraced images in realtime in good enough quality will end up being the standard. In my opinion game engines need to get rid of the approximations like cubemaps and screenspaced reflections to be viable in a VFX workflow.
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    Chromogen wrote: »
    Renderman is finally free for non commercial use! Anyone looking forward to trying it out? Also what are your thoughts on how this might affect Vray or Arnold?

    i don't think it will make too much of a difference for jobs. seems arnold and vray are already well established and places that in the past were relying heavily on renderman have since at least partially moved away.

    i've not paid attention in the last few years but guess renderman is still a pretty technical affair and it's upsides are more interesting for pipeline-integration rather than to the one-man army?

    i wouldn't want to deal with renderman artist tools and similar shenanigans again. would prefer to look at corona myself. free version (from their testing phase) available, too. looking good.
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    for me it feel more liek on man army than the other renderer just klick on render and let it do... more artistfrendly that all the other...
  • Deathstick
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    Deathstick polycounter lvl 7
    I'd say realtime can be where it's at when you're working on small budget projects with one or two people and solo computers.

    [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zjPiGVSnfI[/ame]

    I mean to even get close to something with this graphic fidelity with a traditional renderer would take fucking ages to render out. Hours, days, weeks that are basically wasted, especially when all of a sudden someone wants a change and wants to quickly see how it will look in the final output. And then there's things like the dynamic shadows not being high enough resolution, fade out on small objects, etc that are basically solved with a tweak of the config scalability settings.

    The only thing I really hope Unreal gets around to is implementing alembic support/an easy way to get vertex-baked animation on over. With that, the doors should basically be opened up in getting animation made through things like modifiers, simulations, etc from your main 3D package directly into Unreal for fast rendering. Woould love to see shit like metaballs in unreal :D

    All that said is for one-man army/laptop type stuff though. I don't really see people throwing away their server farms and cpu-renderers anytime this century, probably more towards embracing better visualization tools that give a sense of the final output like Clarisse than 100% real-time gpu-based for the big guys, or taking the best parts out of both.
  • unit187
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    unit187 polycounter lvl 9
    Depends on how easy it is to use. If VRay is objectively easier to make great looking stuff with, then I'm sure most people who require free will be more than happy to just keep pirating VRay.
    I have installed it for Maya. Despite all my Maya knowledge I couldn't figure it out how to make it work. I did quick google search and found nothing. I just wanted to play around with it, nothing serious, so I gave up.
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    if the plugin does not show... you need to create a environment variable...
    same you have to do for arnold...
    https://renderman.pixar.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26795&perpage=25&pagenumber=1
  • oskarkeo
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    oskarkeo polycounter lvl 10
    mantragora wrote: »
    This will not affect them. On the other hand THIS will affect all of them in a hard way.

    +100 yessum. When that starwars/lucasfilm realtime vid came out last year there was one user (from Hong Kong i think, on cg society) basically saying, the writings on the wall. I wish i could find his origianl post, as it shocked me. It is however, true, even if it takes 5 years.

    in terms of the current defferred renderers, Last year with work i met with Chaos Group and Solidangle (pixar didn't have a local office) about render farm upgrades. Chaos were all into gpu solutions, but didn't have the features supported. Arnold were further away for gpu, as they market themselves on quality rather than speed. They are however, now the priciest solution overall.

    I couldn't evaluate renderman, but heard some really promising reports. regarding speed, quality and ease of use (apparantly less need for render TDs).
  • [Deleted User]
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    [Deleted User] polycounter lvl 3
    Game engines are designed to make games, you want real time renderers that plug right into max and use he same high quality shaders that your offline renderer supports, and it's already available.

    They are probably using CineBox, which is a modified version of CryEngine, with couple additional things implemented which you will not find in standard Steam version of CryEngine. Different GI, hairs etc. And on top of it it does have some more movie like production features.
  • Deathstick
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    Deathstick polycounter lvl 7
    Cinebox sounds quite interesting to me, is there a way to get it as a solo freelancer, or are they only targeting major studios?
  • skyline5gtr
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    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    at this pace all software will be free, and its a great plan. Get everyone using it so they can make something
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