Renderman Gets Blender Integration 31
jones_supa writes: Now that Renderman has been available for free for non-commercial use for a while, there has been many requests for integration with Blender. An initiative spearheaded by Pixar now presents the first Blender to Renderman plugin. With the release of PRMan 20, a small group of developers headed by Brian Savery of Pixar have been working on support for using Renderman and Blender together. The plugin is still in early alpha but has had many great developments in the last few weeks. The source code is available in GitHub.
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Because they are losing money and the tech equivalent of Enron?
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A free Renderman isn't really useful to Blender users except for the Whizbang "Yay we're using otherwise expensive software" bragging rights. The comments on the article for Blendernation are telling. "No GPU? Cycles is faster with a GPU than PRMan on the CPU." This is true. In fact PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers for almost a decade let alone stripped down hobbyist renderers. Yes Pixar uses, yes ILM uses it but outside of ILM and Pixar applic
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Whatever you're rendering, you probably aren't benefiting from PRMan's really distinguishing features if you're using blender.
For the average Blender-user, that's probably true, but certainly not because
PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers for almost a decade
... since most Blender-users are not going to be rendering multi-billion polygon scenes with massive displacement, instancing, complex shader networks, complex AOV output and custom-written Renderman shaders.
Sorry, but your statement is just completely wrong!
You mean the VFX companies who made Avengers: Age of Ultron, Cinderella, Ex Machina, Fast and Furious 7, Inside Out, Jupiter Ascending, Jurassic World, Mad Max: Fury Ro
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You mean the VFX companies thought they'd chose an "incredibly slow" production renderer, rather than Arnold?
RenderMan has been a hybrid renderer for some time now
Yes I am saying that. There are a couple reasons for that. For one thing there is a lot of inertia in the industry and for good reason. You don't want to move from a tool that you know works, has worked on dozens of features previously and adopt something which might not work. Arnold is only creeping into production. Render TDs aren't familiar with raytracing in general. Lighting TDs are used to cheating everything. Only 1 production renderer historically had been the renderer of choice for feat
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This is true. In fact PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers
I thought it has been very fast at what it was designed to do, and perhaps slower on what those other production renderers were designed to do, which often wasn't stuff that Pixar was interested in.
okay, but does it blen... (Score:4, Funny)
... nevermind, too easy.
"..there has been many.." (Score:2)
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Uhh...yeah. Sorry about that. Here, have a Snickers.
-- submitter
Renderman? (Score:2)
Is Renderman a superhero who can separate meat from bones?
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No - Renderman is the dude in charge of the Enlightenment project.
Re:Renderman? (Score:4, Funny)
No, Renderman is the nemesis of Blenderman. He morphs into pixels the rays from Blenderman's polyguns.
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In case you didn't realise he was one of the original team who developed Renderman, and is still instrumental to keeping it a viable production renderer.
Someone break the good news to this poor bastard! (Score:1)
Renderman on YouTube (Score:1)