
RenderMan Price Restructuring - amock
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/non-commercial
======
bhouston
There are too many mature renderers and the competition is intense.

The current popular actively developed ones are: V-Ray (which we use in
[http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io)), Arnold, Maxwell, Pixar's RenderMan, and
KeyShot.

Less popular but actively developed ones are: RedShift, Furry Ball, 3Delight,
NVIDIA iRay, Octane/Bridge...

And then the ones that are integrated into the 3D packages themselves like
Blender's Cycles, Modo's renderer, Cinema 4D's renderer, Houdini's Mantra,
Mental Images (included in most Autodesk products.)

Then the smaller opensource ones: Sunflow, Lux, Corona, Mitsuba, Pixie...

That is a lot of renderers and I am sure that I am missing quite a few.

~~~
astrodust
How many of those take advantage of GPU floating point power? This is no
longer a nice to have sort of thing, but a critical one, since as the new Mac
Pro shows, there's going to be orders of magnitude more GPU than CPU power
available in newer workstations.

I've seem some, like Furry Ball, that support only CUDA, but very few are
vendor agnostic with OpenCL. I hope AMD tries to fix this.

~~~
MrScruff
I don't think it's a critical feature for a commercial renderer.

\- CPU renders typically might use 32Gb memory (or more).

\- most rendering is done on a render farm which won't have GPUs (unless you
maintain a gnu render farm).

There are good reasons why commercial renderers are avoiding the GPU, at least
for now.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Xeon Phi may well cement this further. Knight's Landing, due in 2015, is going
to feature 72 Atom cores (288 threads) with AVX, socketed in a standard Xeon
motherboard.

In situations where your problem domain doesn't fit comfortably within the
memory restrictions of a GPU, or porting a legacy code base difficult, this
could be a very interesting option.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Landing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Landing)

~~~
bhouston
It is a non-starter for the successful commercial renderers because the
majority of their market already has render farms with standard CPUs. Also
studios generally use a mix of tools and if only one of them is optimized for
Xeon Phi's that isn't enough of a motivation to spend the money on Xeon Phi's.

It is generally a no go in the mainstream rendering market, although cloud-
based renderers can use specialized solutions.

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pyrmont
It's not mentioned in the text of the post itself, but the $495 price
represents a 75% discount on the previous price. A far more detailed overview
is here for those interested: [http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-
and-the-start-o...](http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-
start-of-next-25-years/)

~~~
berkut
Also less than half the price of Arnold and VRay now...

It's possible they were hemorrhaging money thanks to the Arnold and VRay
competition over the past few years.

Looks like ILM are being "coerced" into using PRMan again from what I hear...

But either way, it sounds like either they're willing to take a hit on the
profits, or they're expecting to make up for it from renderfarm expansions...

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glifchits
I feel like the main takeaway is that they recognized non-commercial use of
this crazy expensive software to be legitimate. I think this covers 80% of the
use cases where people turn to piracy instead. Good on Pixar. Lets see if
Adobe follows suit sometime soon. I know some design students who don't buy a
lot of textbooks but have a hole in their pocket from Creative Suite.

~~~
whyenot
>I know some design students who don't buy a lot of textbooks but have a hole
in their pocket from Creative Suite.

An educational license for Adobe Creative Cloud, which covers virtually all of
Adobe's products, is $300 a year. I'm sorry, but if you are in art school and
can't afford to pay that there is something very, very wrong and it's not with
the price. Many schools even have a site license and you only pay a nominal
fee or nothing at all for Adobe CC while enrolled.

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anigbrowl
At $495 per license and free for non-commercial use, this is a pretty big
deal. Interesting to see how Keyshot will respond to this.

~~~
bhouston
KeyShot is more for static product rendering and not the animation market
where RenderMan is targeted towards. So I am not sure there is direct
competition between the two.

~~~
anigbrowl
Agreed, but they've been marketing Keyshot at the animation space lately (it's
all over their website) and I've heard it labeled as 'poor man's Pixar'.

~~~
bhouston
Animation for product rendering though:

[https://www.keyshot.com/3d-animation/](https://www.keyshot.com/3d-animation/)

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sitkack
> For non-commercial users we are making Renderman free.

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VikingCoder
So, now that RenderMan is free for non-commercial use, what do people consider
to be the contenders for best-in-class free software for modeling, animating,
lighting, etc?

If you wanted to set up an all-free environment to learn, what's the list of
software you would use?

~~~
bhouston
I'm highly biased, but I think our project,
[http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io), is the least hassles for learning the
basics. But it is more limited than the other more established programs.

[http://www.blender.org](http://www.blender.org) is the primary desktop open
source solution.

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quarterwave
When (if at all) will it be feasible for a bunch of kids in a garage to make a
feature-length realistic-cgi movie? Assume computing on the public cloud,
movie budget $1M.

~~~
ykl
The big cost driver in making animated movies isn't in the software or tools
anymore and hasn't been for some time now; the big cost driver is now in
authoring all of the assets and content that you actually need. It takes a ton
of really talented people to create all of the photorealistic detailed models
and animation and whatnot that you need to make a CG movie look convincing.
Artists are way more expensive than computers.

~~~
dualogy
> Artists are way more expensive than computers

YC disciples totally need to Disrupt The Heck Out Of That Niche

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VikingCoder
There's also RenderMan On Demand, which seemed like an interesting but odd
fit:

[https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/](https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/)

Maybe useful if you hit crunch mode, I guess.

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icantthinkofone
OT: So I was in Marin County in 1991, all excited after my interview with
Pixar. Drove my rented car back to the airport and hopped on the shuttle to
the main terminal. Sat in my seat just as another guy struggled to get a box I
recognized as a small computer onto the shuttle. He looked at me and I got up
to help him but he had someone he was with who showed up and they lifted the
box together.

The first guy was Ed Catmull in the video. I recognized him but didn't know
what to say and he got into some deep discussion with the guy he was with.

I got a job offer from Pixar but turned them down cause my first child was
just born and, at the time, I was concerned about Pixar's stability which
turned out to be a correct belief back then. Instead, I accepted an offer from
Silicon Graphics and sat next to Jim Clark in the lunch room as much as I
could.

~~~
GuiA
Do you have any advice for non-graphics programmers (save for a few
undergrad/grad classes) who want to get into graphics? (still fairly early in
career)

~~~
dualogy
Outperforming everyone contributing to shadertoy.com might be a start ;)

