Attached Link: http://renderman.pixar.com/view/registration

Oh if he isnt just the cutest!!!!

Here is the article straight from the horse's mouth: http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25846

Cheers.

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/poserman.html

Well, it will take a lot more than that to get anything decent with RM but the announcement is groundbreaking nonetheless :)

I have used RIB format from DS4.6 to render in 3Delight batch mode when I want not to tie up studio.

Never having any luck with PP2014 RIB export in 3Delight.

On announcement page they are saying no user interface, so possibly a two step is possible, like PoserFusion to Maya or Interposer to C4D then out.

If it takes unattached RIB file, it may be easier to bridge from DS than Poser

It would be nice if there was something like Reality for Renderman... This would be a wonderful opportunity for a programmer who uses Poser or Studio. Too bad I ain't a programmer.

Quote - It would be nice if there was something like Reality for Renderman...

Guess why I posted the announcement on our FB page ... ;)

Quote - > Quote - It would be nice if there was something like Reality for Renderman...

Guess why I posted the announcement on our FB page ... ;)

Is this a hint that you're making a bridge to RM?

Quote - Is this a hint that you're making a bridge to RM?

Prêt-à-3D is named taking inspiration from the Prêt-à-Porter, the "ready to wear" fashion that makes designer clothing affordable for the larger public. The goal of our company is to bring high-end graphic in the hands of everybody. It's "3D ready to wear".

When I saw the announcement of free Renderman I immediately thought at the possibilities. The announcement fits perfectly our company's mission. It's very early at this stage but I definitely have a strong interest in this. 

We have shown that it's possible to create a bridge between Poser or Studio and other high-end renderers while keeping the UI artist-friendly. The technology in Reality is designed to be modular and extensible.

We will keep an eye on Pixar, which I visited a couple of times in the past, and their announcement. If Renderman becomes accessible to the masses we will explore all the ways in which it can be connected to the Poser/Studio world.

Cheers.

Well that's good news indeed!

Quote - > Quote - Is this a hint that you're making a bridge to RM?

Prêt-à-3D is named taking inspiration from the Prêt-à-Porter, the "ready to wear" fashion that makes designer clothing affordable for the larger public. The goal of our company is to bring high-end graphic in the hands of everybody. It's "3D ready to wear".

When I saw the announcement of free Renderman I immediately thought at the possibilities. The announcement fits perfectly our company's mission. It's very early at this stage but I definitely have a strong interest in this. 

We have shown that it's possible to create a bridge between Poser or Studio and other high-end renderers while keeping the UI artist-friendly. The technology in Reality is designed to be modular and extensible.

We will keep an eye on Pixar, which I visited a couple of times in the past, and their announcement. If Renderman becomes accessible to the masses we will explore all the ways in which it can be connected to the Poser/Studio world.

Cheers.

Paolo, if you do end up creating a bridge for PRMan, I'd definitely buy it!

Quote - > Quote - Is this a hint that you're making a bridge to RM?

Prêt-à-3D is named taking inspiration from the Prêt-à-Porter, the "ready to wear" fashion that makes designer clothing affordable for the larger public. The goal of our company is to bring high-end graphic in the hands of everybody. It's "3D ready to wear".

Love that mission statement!

I don't use Reality much because I'm personally very impatient with slow renders. I need to spend more time working with it. In the long run, it might well save me time.

But I can say one thing, Prêt-à-3D's customer service is excellent. And the product is excellent.

Quote - Paolo, if you do end up creating a bridge for PRMan, I'd definitely buy it!

Thank you, I appreciate it. Time will tell. Right now I have to finish Reality for Studio but I will defintely look into RM when it comes out and see what it can be done with it.

Cheers.

Quote - Love that mission statement! I don't use Reality much because I'm personally very impatient with slow renders. I need to spend more time working with it. In the long run, it might well save me time.

But I can say one thing, Prêt-à-3D's customer service is excellent. And the product is excellent.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

LuxRender is actually pretty fast, faster than other similar renderers. It is a professional renderer that has everything "turned to 11" :) so it poses more load on the machine. Faster computers, with more cores, can help dramatically. For the past four years I have renderered my images exclusively with LuxRender, via Reality, and never felt the need to go back to something else. 

We have a very active and helpful community online so we will gladly help you address any optimization that you might want to address.

Cheers.

Pixar has yet to define non-commerical.  I'll wait to see what exactly their definition of commercial and non-commercial use is.

I have to ask, why would PRman be something a hobbyist user has interest in, aside from the fact it's free?  Renderman's popularity professionally was it's extensibility in a studio pipeline.  What would it bring to the table for an individual user, beyond the render options already on the market?  It doesn't bring any higher level of realism  than what is available in Luxrender, Octane, Vray, or the other engines out there.  In fact, I find it perplexing that the community would take interest in what is, at it's core,  a bigger, more complex version of what they are already using in Poser... Firefly.  Actually, renderman has seen an incredible decline in studio interest over the years, and engines like Vray and MentalRay have increased in popularity and professional use.  The fact it is now free will probably change that to some degree, but there are many studios which could have employed Renderman in their workflow, but have decided to go with other solutions, because of speed and ease of use.  A Poser bridge could assist in the ease of use, but compared to the new render technologies, like soon-to-be realtime unbiased rendering, and the Poser community's fascination with higher levels of realism, I see Prman as taking a step back in time, rather than moving forward with technology.  Unless you are involved in some kind of independant studio, where it could enhance your pipeline flexibility.

There have been very interesting updates to Renderman recently. They added unbiased rendering and support for GPU.

Up to a couple of months ago I thought int the same way, maxxxmodelz, but recent disclosures by Pixar made it clear that they have modernized Renderman quite a bit. Neverthless, the price was just too high to "take a peek."

With the new free edition it will be possible to explore the new features and compare the rendering pipelines. I have a feeling that the new Renderman has potential to be intersting for the Poserverse. We will see. Soon.

Cheers.

Quote - LuxRender is actually pretty fast, faster than other similar renderers.

Paolo, which renderers?  I've tried Maxwell, Octane (GPU, but still similar unbiased PathTracing algorithm), Mitsuba, Corona (this one is extremely fast for CPU unbiased rendering), Iray, and Thea.  All of which were much faster than Luxrender on the same machine, and same scenes.  Luxrender seemed the slowest, and provided the least control of any of these unbiased render engines.  Admittedly, some of them were hybrid render engines, or allowed you to define some degree of bias if you wanted to speed things up, but even in full unbiased modes, I found them much faster.  Luxrender, however, was the most accurate.  It solved complex caustics with more physical accuracy.

Paolo

Any idea what Pixar means by non-commercial?  Non-commercial as in you cannot use the free edition because you are a company/corporate entity or non-commercial as in renders made cannot be used for commercial purposes?

Actually, PRMan has had unbiased rendering for years. A common misconception is that the PR in PRMan stands for Pixar RenderMan, which is wrong. The name was changed many years ago to distiguish it from the other Renderman variants as being able to do unbiased rendering (it was the first Rendeman to do so), thus the PR part of the name actually stands for Photo Realistic (this was done either in the late 90's or early 2000's).

There have been many feature enhancements and a lot of speed optimization to provide faster rendering while the studios are pushing closer to true unbiased rendering in production. This new focus on improving the "photorealistic" speed, and capabilities, with the new hybrid shader based biased/unbiased rendering in PRMan are primarily in response to the need for more predictable lighting/shader interactions with less user intervention (people are more expensive than CPU cores).

PRMan is a very complex, but an interface like Reality would make it much more user friendly/accessable. Yes, many of the alternate render engines have probably displaced PRMan a bit in smaller studios, or in larger studios where some of the alternatives fit their needs/workflows better, but PRMan still has a huge userbase in terms of large production environments. It is extremely stable, and has some of the best, most responsive tech support available (of course that is for the commercial clients). One thing the new pricing policy is sure to do is give a lot more aspiring shader artists easy access to PRMan, and improve the availability of experienced PRMan users. As a marketing strategy, this will no doubt improve PRMan's position in the industry.

Why would I like to use PRMan? I'm a bit of a tech geek, and would find it very interesting. It also has some fantastic shader capabilities, and there is actualy a text available for it's shaders (I like real manuals/books). PRMan would give me the best of all worlds when combined with Octane and Lux, which means that I could chose the render engine that best fits my needs. Plus it will be free for non comercial use, the ability to learn/use a render engine of this caliber for such a nominal fee is a true rarity (the reason behind recently getting the educational version of Maya).

Quote - Paolo Any idea what Pixar means by non-commercial?  Non-commercial as in you cannot use the free edition because you are a company/corporate entity or non-commercial as in renders made cannot be used for commercial purposes?

My guess is that is means for non-commercial purposes, which for a render engine would be no commercial renders. I'd say shoot them an email after Sigraph, the details will be announced and finalized then. Any questions prior to that will probably not get an answer.

You have to be careful to compare similar things. Mitsuba is research project which doesn't have the level of completeness of LuxRender. Octane does not have the same features of Lux nor it can process scenes of the same complexity. Corona and Iray I don't know and Thea could be a contender but I never tried it. Maxwell, as much as I know is comparable in speed with Luxrender but it costs $775 per license and doesn't allow you to use rendernode. If a software costing that much was not faster I would be wondering what people pay for. LuxRender, on the other hand, uses all the cores in your machine and it can use any number of rendernodes on any comobiantion of Mac OS, Windows and Linux. 

LuxRender can be considerably faster than Vue and it can be even faster than 3Delight. I know that this last statement will surprise many but I actually have proof. The deal is that very few people try to use 3Delight at a near equivalent point with LuxRender. 

Cirstyn Bech-Yager, a former 3D World editor, who is a skilled modeler and contracts for firms like AMD was trying to render the attached scene with 3Delight. As we can see, after more than 8 and a half hours the render reached only one fifth of the result and the level of realism is nowhere near what you can obtain with LuxRender. Not even comparable.

Cirstyn's machine, for that render, used a quad-core i7-870 at 2.93Mhz. As we know LuxRender provides the whole frame right away, refining it progressively. That way of working helps tremenduosly with productivity and with getting the result out in the shortest time possible. 

When comparing renderers it's important to dig deeply and compare feature by feature. LuxRender has a breath and accuracy that are not easily found in other products.

Cheers.

Quote - Any idea what Pixar means by non-commercial?  Non-commercial as in you cannot use the free edition because you are a company/corporate entity or non-commercial as in renders made cannot be used for commercial purposes?

The press release talks about personal, non-commercial use. I don't know more than you but I would think that they mean that the rendered image cannot be used for advertising or rendering of movies where people pay for viewing or similar commercial uses. 

Note that Pixar explicitly say that the images will not have any limit in size and will not be watermarked. That statement alone is indicative of the trend, in my opinion. I think that most users of Poser and Studio, who make work for their own amusement, are going to be covered by the non-commercial version. For the ones who do commercial work the $495 license is quite reasonable.

Of course LuxRender is perfectly suitable in any sutuation :)

Quote - LuxRender can be considerably faster than Vue and it can be even faster than 3Delight. I know that this last statement will surprise many but I actually have proof. The deal is that very few people try to use 3Delight at a near equivalent point with LuxRender.

Benchmarking 3Dlight to Luxrender is one thing, but doing so with Octane and equivalent unbiased render engines is another.  You had mentioned it's faster than other similar render engines, so I was to assume you were referring to physical, unbiased rendering.  I don't disagree that to get even close to the quality of Luxrender, 3Dlight and Firefly start to look just as "slow".

Which brings me to my next point.  PRMan's speed in this area of rendering.  Granted, there were speed enhancements.  There were things like GI and unbiased rendering "added" to it after the fact, to meet the growing demand for such rendering accuracy.  But how much optimization did it get in that regard, because when I last looked at the engine, it was the slowest of any at brute force, biased GI, let alone unbiased physically accurate results.

I'm very skeptical of this release.  I feel PRman's render technology is only attractive to big production studios, and that's mainly for it's shader language flexibility.  Let's see where the free release goes.  It has LOTS of steep competition now.  Vray is industry standard for most production houses I've been a part of here in the states, and Arnold is untouchable when it comes to serious, production-level photorealistic lighting.  Arnold's ability to interact with real-world stage lighting, and translate that information in near real-time to a 3D scene, etc, is very impressive.  ARnold is being used by some very big production studios now as well.

We shall see.

Quote - Actually, PRMan has had unbiased rendering for years.

Well, Global Illumination was introduced to the engine in 2011, but the Path Tracing algorithm wasn't introduced until 2013. I'm interested in unbiased Path Tracing.

Quote - You had mentioned it's faster than other similar render engines, so I was to assume you were referring to physical, unbiased rendering. 

No, I was referring to other renderers in general. Renderers that can render full scenes with 4K textures, multiple figures, environments and so on. Scene that can take multi-gigabytes to render. To note that the 3Delight scene that I posted had one figure with clothing, not so complex and it brought the system to its knees. LuxRender scales up much more easily. 

Scalability is one of the things that is interesting for me with Renderman. If you look at the Pixar movies, for example the recent Monsters University, they have a plethora of characters in them, complex props and with physics-based lights. Obviously Renderman is able to process those scenes and that is quite interesting. 

Of course this is all speculation. I will need to have the software in my hands and have enough time to study before I will be able to conclude if it has a future in the Poserverse. 

Cheers.

Quote - Well, Global Illumination was introduced to the engine in 2011, but the Path Tracing algorithm wasn't introduced until 2013. I'm interested in unbiased Path Tracing.

A quick search of the web gives some conflicting information regarding the time frame of GI and Ray Tracing (and confirms what I had been told by an individual who works with PRMan daily - you had me wondering :blink: ). According to this article, Pixar's Renderman had GI in 2003. While this article clearly shows that ray tracing was available in release 11 in 2002.

But, as you noted, the commercial availability of Path Tracing didn't happend until 2013, though it was obviously used for production in Monsters University, as can be easily inferred from this article (and others about new processes developed for M.U.).

As parts of this thread seems to have developed into an advert does that mean I'm allowed to advertise as well ? :)

Quote - A quick search of the web gives some conflicting information regarding the time frame of GI and Ray Tracing (and confirms what I had been told by an individual who works with PRMan daily - you had me wondering :blink: ). According to this article, Pixar's Renderman had GI in 2003. While thisarticle clearly shows that ray tracing was available in release 11 in 2002. But, as you noted, the commercial availability of Path Tracing didn't happend until 2013, though it was obviously used for production in Monsters University, as can be easily inferred from this article (and others about new processes developed for M.U.).

I see what you're saying.  I was basing my dates on the timestamps of the PRman feature list documentation, which indicates the year each feature was officially added to the software, or at least that's what I thought was the case.  Renderman 17 offered progressive raytracing of GI, but I see no indication of it being an unbiased solution?  Physically based, yes of course.

Arnold, on the other hand, is built from the ground up as an efficient path tracer, meant to work with the least amount of hacks and cheats possible, and has been optimized for incredible realistic, simple performance in this regard.  It has been used as a single-pass, production GI render solution, which wasn't even considered an option in the past for VFX studios.  Before this announcement, Arnold was poised to take over the top spot as leading production renderer in most major VFX houses.  Interesting timing.

Dont forget, we're only talking about the VFX industry here.  Other 3D-centric industries, like the game industry, and Arch-Viz, never really used PRman at all.  Vray leads the way in the arch-viz industry, where photorealism is a must.  Octane, however, is making major advances here as well, because of the speed vs. quality ratio, and other factors.  A free PRman won't make much of an dent in these genres either.  I think the days of PRman's relevance to the industry were coming to an end, and this was a last effort to change that.  I'm just not convinced it will.