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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: 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.