RenderMan is now free for non-commercial use
You can now download a copy of RenderMan for your non-commercial projects. Now all we need is good Blender integration!
Anuga writes:I’ve been using RenderMan for a while now at my workplace, but now I can utilize it at home as well! AWESOME!!!
RenderMan is now free for all non-commercial purposes, including evaluations, education, research, and personal projects. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation. For further details please refer to Pixar’s Non-Commercial RenderMan FAQ.
If you’re ready to get started with Free Non-Commercial RenderMan …
then you may proceed to Download & Installation.They even included Blender as a potential candidate, so what are we waiting for?
Even before this announcement, it’s kind of amazing that RenderMan integration into Blender wasn’t ever really a thing.
well , there’s a worker from renderman doing some sort of script to integrate it but he said that it will not work till the next version of renderman because python compatibility
I’ve integrated RenderMan into Blender for a handful of years now. It works for me, but it’s not ready for public release (before you ask). I’ve failed to comment any of my code because I just wanted it to work. The impetus behind this was simple: I love RenderMan (for various reasons – history, being one); and I use Blender even for Hollywood work that I do. There were always license mismatches and other political things in the way, as well. However, I’m in regular talks with my friends at Pixar about all this. They (at least some) know what I’ve been up to. They offered me beta licenses partly because of my efforts (which are purely artistic, by the way). My system is node-based and fully integrated into Blender. LuxRender was my main inspiration (those guys are so on top of everything). If I can get some folks at Pixar to help me out and really run with what I’ve started, that would be cool. However, time will tell. I’ve got a lot to get my head around with the new Depsgraph and all.
I’ve never really seen much genuine interest in RenderMan/Blender integration whenever I’ve brought it up in the community, so I never really pursued it much past my own interests, which are personal AND professional. Maybe some people could give me their thoughts on it through this article.
As an aside, I think maybe it would be a good idea even outside the whole RenderMan realm, if Blender/OpenSubdiv integration became inherently part of the system. Just my opinion. I don’t mean to make a thing out of it.
I’m a hobbyist who produces only non-commercial animation projects, and I would love to see a free, high quality and above all fast rendering engine available in Blender. Although I have a PC with a fast GPU, I still find myself struggling against the limitations imposed by Cycle’s speed performance. If Renderman could provide a faster alternative, then I for one would be extremely interested!
I’m not sure Renderman is faster if you’re using all the whistles and bells. Back in the day it was fast because it didn’t support raytracing. That’s also why it could do things like tessellate geometry to the micropolygon level. But these days its probably similar to other engines. I haven’t messed with it years though.
Cycles is actually pretty fast for what it does. I find that the only thing that really slows it down is having multiple light bounces. Turn that off and it should be a bit faster even than Blender Internal- at least if you’re using motion blur and indirect lighting/ambient occlusion.
Also I’m not sure Renderman even uses GPUs. Does anyone know if it does or not?
My comment was prompted by a CPU biased rendering comparison of FurryBall with other engines, which seems to imply that (while not as fast as FurryBall, of course), Renderman is extremely fast. The times quoted are: FurryBall: 23 s; Renderman: 1 min 23 s; MentalRay: 40 mins; Vray 38 mins 21 s; Maxwell 40 mins; and Arnold: 12 mins 24 s. This is the link: http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/speedCompareDx/index.html.
What’s going on there?
P.S. Since Renderman isn’t listed under the GPU rendering comparisons (on another FurryBall site page), I assume that means it doesn’t use GPU.
I’d really like to see any integration you have, even an extremely experimental one. I love renderman but I’ve insofar been making everything in blender then moving it over to maya to use renderman, which is annoying because I really dislike the maya workflow. The thing that I’ve noticed about the blender community is that there are two types of features in terms of the way they interact: There are the main features, which everyone harasses the devs to add in, and then there are other features which they don’t beg for, but after they are implemented, everyone uses, and is glad for.
Essentially what I’m trying to say is, often, it’s really hard to get the blender community interested in a project until they have something they can use, even if it’s an early, buggy version, then they get excited.
Whatever you have, put it on github or something. If it works it could be a base to start from, provide ideas etc. Don’t be embarrased of your code. Trust the community.
With free renderman this will get much more momentum than in the past.
A long time ago there was an integration of Renderman into the Blender – RIB Mosaic by Eric Back (WHiTeRaBBiT) and it was a good integration, but project is dead.
There is an active bridge currently in development, it is a fork of Matt Ebb’s blender to 3Delight bridge, but designed for RenderMan’s new RIS Mode (full path tracer), with it’s various selectable integrators. (Ray Trace, Bi-Directional Ray Tracing, etc).
It relies on RenderMan support for Python 3, which is coming in RenderMan 20, which is in late beta stage, so not long to wait now.
Here is the project on github for those interested. https://github.com/bsavery/PRMan-for-Blender
HPETRUS, I am sure Brian would love to chat with you to see what improvements can be made to the project leveraging your work.
Regards
Peter Moxom
Pixar’s RenderMan Team
Thanks for that info, Peter. I can’t wait to see what I can do with it.
Hi Peter —
I’ll check out the link and make contact with the relevant people. See if we can get something going.
Thanks.
There are 2 major improvements with these versions of Renderman that I liked a lot to see implemented onto cycle:
a new scene aware algorithms to reduce noise in post and, the killer func, the ability to stop a render and resume it. With this function you can calculate an animation in low quality (20s/frame for example) and resume it only after validation of the motion/shading/lighting (for daylies)