
Free Non-Commercial Renderman - ykl
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/non-commercial-renderman
======
krschultz
_10\. How does Pixar define "Non-Commercial" use? Simply, any usage of
RenderMan that does not generate direct profits. Examples of non-commercial
usage include evaluations, personal projects, learning, student and academic
use, experimentation and research._

There is a narrow line between "personal project" and "commercial". What if
you come up with something that has ads on YouTube, are you commercial now?
What if you come up with something, and then subsequently make a kickstarter
with the characters you created in the original "non-commercial" project?

edit: as people pointed out in the replies, there is an exception for video
ads, which really just reinforces how complicated free-as-in-beer can get

 _13\. Are there any profit earning exceptions to the "Non-Commercial" use
rule? Yes. Indirect revenue generating activities such as personal images or
clips posted on YouTube or Vimeo that may result in advertising revenue are
permitted. Please include a credit that your work was rendered with Pixar's
RenderMan. If you are uncertain as to whether your requirement qualifies as
non-commercial, please contact rendermansales@pixar.com for clarification._

~~~
halflings
From that definition I'd say getting ad revenue from a video you've made with
RenderMan is pretty much as commercial as it gets.

~~~
crazypyro
Nope, it clearly states in the faq that ads are considered indirect, but they
ask that you give credit to RenderMan.

------
SloopJon
Cool. This was announced almost a year ago. Pixar seems to define non-
commercial reasonably, although there may be some fuzzy areas, such as
YouTube. Okay, so long as you're not posting to a channel for which you share
in the ad revenue?

I was curious to see what a full license costs, and I was surprised to see
that it's only $500 plus maintenance. Didn't this used to cost $10,000 or so?

~~~
teraflop
From the FAQ:

> Indirect revenue generating activities such as personal images or clips
> posted on YouTube or Vimeo that may result in advertising revenue are
> permitted. Please include a credit that your work was rendered with Pixar's
> RenderMan. If you are uncertain as to whether your requirement qualifies as
> non-commercial, please contact rendermansales@pixar.com for clarification.

[http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849](http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849)

~~~
SloopJon
Thanks. I searched the FAQ for "adv", but somehow missed that.

------
msie
Free Unity, Unreal, Maya, Renderman... Creators these days have it so good!

~~~
tomjen3
Seriously though, what can Maya do that Blender can't?

~~~
wolfgke
Being one of the industry standards for 3D modeling. OK, and having a file
format that can at least in theory be read by other programs (.blend files are
simply undocumented memory dumps).

~~~
GroSacASacs
Sure, .blend files are basically useless outside of Blender, and that's why
there's an export command that lets you export what you made into other format
like .X3D (xml based) for example or even Wavefront .obj file.

~~~
wolfgke
But can you guarantee that no information is lost by exporting? I personally
have my doubts (and I had bad experience with the Blender exporters in the
past on this point; perhaps the bugs are fixed now).

In my opinion Blender should introduce two file formats:

\- .blend: The existing format; fast to load, save etc., but not for reading
from external programs

\- .blend_external: A format that presents exactly the same information as a
.blend file, but can be read easily by external software and is thus
completely documented in all details. Perhaps more slow to load/save (which
should not matter for the purposes of .blend_external).

~~~
smosher_
> But can you guarantee that no information is lost by exporting?

You practically never can when exporting in any format, from any program,
since few formats are subsets of any others. The important thing is to be able
to export the information you need. Most formats cover the same things, so
chances are you can export what you need.

FWIW, I've seen a few projects that import blend files. Serialized memory
dumps are not a bad thing and are easy to write loaders for (as long as
they're documented sufficiently and/or have libraries available.)

I don't see why you would need to have a separate format. As long as .blend is
fully documented up to the point of being able to recover all the application-
agnostic data I don't see a benefit to splitting off another format. It might
make sense to omit the Blender-specific UI data and so on, but I don't think
that really needs a separate format to accomplish.

> and I had bad experience with the Blender exporters in the past on this
> point

Bad experiences with Blender exporters will probably never cease. Many of them
are written by a single person to scratch an itch and do the minimum they need
from it. That isn't to say you won't find quality ones, but unless and until
all formats have exporters in-tree and are dutifully maintained, there will be
occasional breakage. The good news is the quality tends upward, so exporters
for common formats are probably a lot less disappointing today than when you
last tried them.

------
madez
I was wondering whether they released it as free software or as software that
is free as in free beer. It is the latter.

------
virtualritz
3Delight is RenderMan compliant and has been free for non-commercial use since
2001.

The renderer is more or less on feature parity with Pixar's product. It does
some things better and others worse but if you needed a free RenderMan
compliant offline renderer to do a non-commercial project, these differences
would reasonably not be of any concern to you.

------
ams6110
Pretty sure some version of Renderman was bundled with NeXT workstations back
in the day, along with Sybase and some other normally-commercial stuff.

------
joeblau
Is the video Buffering like crazy for anyone else? I feel like I just jumped
back 15 years to the Real Player days.

Edit: It's working a lot better now. I don't know much about 3D but this tool
looks amazing!

------
yzh
I really wish that Arnold could also release its free academic version.

~~~
ykl
Solid Angle doesn't have an official individual student license option, but I
have heard of Solid Angle coming up with case-by-case arrangements with
students that contacted them directly.

------
chx
I filed
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252108)
when they announced it and noone cared.

------
amelius
The license is complicated, but fortunately, the current trend for
illustrations on the web is 2d.

~~~
tudorw
A current trend is a trend about to be supplanted :)

