Pixar frees its production-grade RenderMan software Pixar Animation Studios has decided to give away RenderMan, its flagship animation software used to create the likes of Toy Story, Wall-E and – less happily – Cars 2. The company decided on the freebie, which will apply only to non-commercial use, after last week releasing a new version of the software said to offer “ an …
It's would be noteworthy, that the educational and free versions of RenderMan (the next release) isn't available yet.
As always, it'll be Real Soon Now.
It's also noteworthy (unless it's because I've never done any commercial grade graphics) that they don't have system requirements or anything even close to that. So if one just plans to "play with it" we have no idea if it's x86, IA64, ARM, iThingy (whichever variation) or a bloody Atari (or even a bank of them).
From the link in the article:
"The new RenderMan is being released in the timeframe of SIGGRAPH 2014 and will be compatible with the following 64-bit operating systems, Mac OS 10.8 and 10.7, Windows 8, 7, and Vista, and Linux. Autodesk Maya compatibility is with versions 2013, 2013.5, 2014, and 2015. Pixar’s annual maintenance program benefits customers with access to ongoing support and free upgrades."
"Rule 34 suddenly just get a lot more real?"
I don't think so. If animation was sellable in that genre, then someone would have already done it and sold it in spades. Why would you need to pay people to demean themselves doing for real in front of cameras, when you can have digital animation engineers do it for you? In the comfort of their own bedrooms no less.
>With RenderMan selling for just $US495 it's hard to see why Pixar cares
> can you explain what's afoot here?
Pixar aren't in the software selling business, they are in the movie making business
Renderman operators are expensive.
If every highschool kid and every art college start using Renderman there will be a lot of potential recruits. A glut reduces prices
It's the same reason ATT made C free, they needed to hire programmers.
Any development tool is useless and pointlessly expensive if you don't have any developers using it. This freebie allows more animators to get skilled with the tool (much like learning to use a pencil or paintbrush) so that Pixar have a bigger pool of ready to go resources when the next film comes along. Shaving even a day or two off the start up time is worth the price of a seat.
PRMan in recent versions appears to have alienated enough people that it is no longer the automatic default for rendering. Pacific Rim (rendered at a company that has effectively free Pixar licenses anyway) was almost entirely rendered in Arnold, and there's a real step away from the technical limitations of PRMan (down I think mostly to historic architectural choices but in practise a disastorous last few "more buggy than usual" version releases) and towards the shiny-shiny that Mantra, Arnold, Clarisse (sp?!), etc. can offer such as real-world lighting models with low-cost indirect illumination, refraction, sub-surface etc.
Pixar may not make a lot of money from PRMan but it likes having the authority of the universal default renderer. Additionally any revenue from software sales does help effectively fund the feature department's R&D work.
Before you rush out to download it, remember that RenderMan is just the engine that generates graphics from your input files. You still have to create the scene, characters/objects, textures, and write the scripts that actually animate things which requires a number of other programs (3d modeling programs, photo editing, etc.) which may or may not be free.
PS: Not saying this is bad, just pointing it out.
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