posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday March 25 2015, @05:38AM
from the unleash-your-artistic-passion dept.
from the unleash-your-artistic-passion dept.
Pixar Animation Studios today released its Academy Award-winning RenderMan software for non-commercial use. Free (as in beer) Non-Commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. It is fully featured, without watermark, time limits, or other user limitations. The EULA is here.
RenderMan is compatible with the following 64-bit operating systems: Mac OS 10.9, 10.8 and 10.7, Windows 8 and 7, and Linux glibc 2.12 or higher and gcc 4.4.5 and higher. RenderMan is compatible with versions 2013.5, 2014, and 2015 of Autodesk’s Maya, and with versions 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0 of The Foundry’s KATANA. Registration is required before download.
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Pixar Releases Non-Commercial Renderman
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2015, @01:12PM
Linux glibc 2.12
Glibc's an operating system now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2015, @01:49PM
well, if chrome is allowed to be an operating system...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday March 25 2015, @01:56PM
Linux is very disconnected from userland stuff. The linux renderman release comes as an RPM as well. Ewwww (i'm a Gentoo user)
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday March 25 2015, @02:33PM
RPM is the standard Linux package format, for what it's worth (not much, source code is the real universal software format, always has been).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2015, @10:04PM
It should be noted at this point that many people derisively refer to the Linux Standard Base as the Red Hat Standard Base.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday March 25 2015, @04:25PM
A Linux distro using glibc 2.12 or higher and gcc 4.4.5 or higher.
What's wrong with that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @03:32AM
Its just a retarded grammar flame.
Yay pedantry!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 25 2015, @01:56PM
I was impressed by Renderman when I first encountered it decades ago, but without access to a relevant system I had to settle for reading the manual and learning from it.
May I regret that it is now only free as in beer, not libre?
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Balderdash on Wednesday March 25 2015, @05:09PM
"Render pig, render ping. Does whatever a render pig does."
- Homer Simpson
I browse at -1. Free and open discourse requires consideration and review of all attempts at participation.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2015, @10:09PM
Does giving away the payware app speak to the success of (gratis and libre) Blender?
Clearly, the vendors of the proprietary app want you to invest your time in learning *their* UI, get hooked, and pay them for a full license when you go pro.
...or, if Disney can hire people pre-trained on their own app, Score!
Has anyone here used both?
Can you list some major differences in capabilities?
Can someone point to an existing page with such a list?
Is Lightwave in the same catecory?
Any other similar apps?
I note that I saw a teaser for this freebie 10 months ago.
It took quite a while to get to this point.
Coming from a Disney-owned operation, one might call that "Mickey Mouse".
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Informative) by forkazoo on Wednesday March 25 2015, @11:25PM
No, not really. Blender is quite different from RenderMan, and isn't widely used in major studios, so it's not obvious why Blender would would be the trigger for this. Blender is a GUI modelling and animation program, RenderMan is an offline rendering program. The RenderMan "UI" is basically just '$prman somefile.rib' on a command line. There are also some tools and nodes that come with the Maya plugin for setting up scenes, but 90% of the time you'd just be using normal renderer-independent Maya tools when setting up a scene. The Cycles renderer that comes with Blender would be a pretty direct comparison to renderMan. Blender itself is more of a Maya competitor, but Maya targets big studios rather than solo artists. That said, integrating Cycles into a large studio pipeline that depends on a lot of custom DSO's for rendertime procedural geometry and whatnot would be... Difficult. Blender and cycles are definitely designed for solo artists and small shops. RenderMan is designed around large shops with custom pipelines. Cycles source is available, so you could make it do anything you want, but it really isn't designed for the same market niche. Lightwave is definitely in the same broad category as Blender - integrated modelling/animation for small shops.
The competition for RenderMan is V-Ray, and more seriously IMHO from Arnold. These two new renderers have been eating Pixar's lunch in terms of mindshare for the last few years, and they are quite a bit cheaper than the price of RenderMan as of a year ago. Pixar is responding to the changes in the market over the last 10 years. It used to be that film tools were obscure, and you got to use them when you got a job at a studio. Today, people expect to be able to do serious work on a home PC and learn a tool before they get hired to use it. Making it free means that students and tinkerers can do their personal projects in RenderMan, and then there will be an army of trained professionals ready when a studio is looking to hire. The other big win is that it makes it easy for anybody with a 3D related tool to integrate RenderMan into their tool via the SDK. That used to require thousands of dollars of licenses, and then your customers would also need to spend thousands of dollars on licenses. Now if you want to embed the renderer in your app, that's free. And your noncommercial users can install it for free as well. It only costs the users who want to license the rendering engine for commercial use. So, expect things like Blender support for rendering in RenderMan to appear Real Soon Now, which expands Pixar's potential market base to anybody playing with Blender, etc.
And just to throw it out there, Disney Feature Animation is now using an internal renderer calledHyperion rather than RenderMan.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday March 26 2015, @03:40AM
No, not really. Blender is quite different from RenderMan, and isn't widely used in major studios, so it's not obvious why Blender would would be the trigger for this. Blender is a GUI modelling and animation program, RenderMan is an offline rendering program.
People mentioning Blender are probably doing so because it comes with its own renderer, so it's a fairly high-profile FOSS 3d modeling app + renderer, not just a standalone modeler. The renderer was only tolerable in the past, but it got a rewrite and became a much nicer one called Cycles a while back as a byproduct of them creating Sintel and having issues with adding modern rendering features to the old engine. It might not be good enough to dethrone the big commercial renderers, but it's good enough for hobbyists to get started on and get nice results with, and that's the sort of thing this kind of "free for non-commercial use" license is intended to combat.
It's not just Blender/Cycles, though. There are other FOSS renderers out there like LuxRender and YafaRay that are still being updated and can do an excellent* job, and at least one previously-commercial renderer -- NOX -- has been open sourced recently. There's healthy competition here, and even if they aren't as good as the commercial options, it helps keep the vendors in line. If they fail to provide attractive options, such as free non-commercial licensing, then the next generation of users might decide the FOSS stuff is "good enough".
* Just for fun, some gallery links for some of the FOSS renderers:
LuxRender [luxrender.net]
YafaRay [yafaray.org]
NOX [evermotion.org]
Blender's gallery [blender.org], which uses a mix of renderers and lists which was used on each image. Most of them used Blender's renderer.