6 ms·

Renderman

78 points by fctorial 5y ago

burlesona 5y ago
I don’t get it. This is a product page for a well known product. What’s noteworthy here?
- nvr219 5y ago
  Maybe it isn't as well-known as we thought and this is the first time people heard of it.
  - orenjacob 5y ago
    That’s certainly possible. But if folks on this site don’t know how ToyStory or JurassicPark were rendered back in the day, let alone like almost every movie with CG in it since, that would be a little surprising. But maybe?
    - zufallsheld 5y ago
      Well, I didn't know until now.
    - 83457 5y ago
      https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
    - city41 5y ago
      I never knew Renderman is usable outside of Pixar. It even says free for non-commercial use which is pretty cool.
- workOrNah 5y ago
  maybe to let ppl know it still exists lol
  - Animats 5y ago
    That may be it. Renderman is of historical interest because it introduced shaders to the industry.[1] That's where the look of Pixar's early work comes from. Everybody else texture-mapped photos of the real world, or 2D paintings, while Pixar was generating infinitely fine detail with shader programs. This allowed the camera to get close to objects without the textures going blurry or blocky. Today, shaders run in GPUs, and everybody does this, but in a different way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      The TMS34010 was also quite relevant in what concerns shaders.
- sircastor 5y ago
  I was under the impression that Renderman was just an internal tool. I didn’t realize they sold it.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I was curious, so checked the Wayback machine. The renderman.pixar.com site has existed since 2005, offering it for sale. I don't know if it was for sale prior to the domain existing: https://web.archive.org/web/20050509112303/https://renderman.pixar.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050509112303/https://renderman...
    - garmaine 5y ago
      It’s been on sale for as long as Pixar has existed. Toy Story was sold to Jobs as a showcase for selling more Renderman instances.
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        Exactly this. The critically acclaimed and profitable films are in a sense just adverts for the tool. They're proof that you could not only have an Oscar-winning movie that used this tool for effects, you can make the entire movie with this tool. See also: Disneyland. People really like Disneyland, and it's profitable for Disney, but it's also one enormous advertisement for their products.
        garmaine 5y ago
        Since Disney and Pixar merged their focus has been on making film franchises and the surrounding merchandise. So it's understandable that most people don't know that wasn't always their focus. When Jobs took over Pixar, he thought they were making a competitor to SGI. They had ambitions to sell not just Renderman licenses, but Renderman hardware. Jobs really wanted them to be a hardware company. They probably saw themselves as occupying the role NVIDIA fills today. The feature film animation studio was sold to Jobs as a way to market their technology, in order to sell more licenses and create the market which would want their (still theoretical) dedicated GPU hardware. Turns out the better play was making an animation studio that would rival and then eventually demolish and replace (via merger and integration) the iconic hand-drawn Disney animation. I suspect the heads of the animation studio within Pixar knew what they were doing though.
- bitwize 5y ago
  People forget that Pixar is a 3D rendering technology company first and only secondly a film studio. When most people out there hear Pixar, they think Toy Story and Finding Nemo, not even knowing about the technology they developed that makes those movies possible.
  - xedeon 5y ago
    Indeed. Ed Catmull (Pixar co-founder) is a pioneer in the 3D/CG space. https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/01/leading-the-way-celebrating-3-memorable-siggraph-leaders.html/ https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/01/leading-the-way-celebratin...
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  I had no idea that renderman is for sale. I thought renderman was Pixar’s in-house magic juice - the tech that puts them apart kinda thing.
  - amelius 5y ago
    How can rendering put a company apart if rendering in just about any tool is already so close to physical reality?
    - gmueckl 5y ago
      The devil is really in the details. Pixar and Disney throw scenes at Renderman for overnight rendering jobs where each node loads up to terabytes of data per frame (geometry, textures, volumes...). So the renderer contains tons of tricky optimizations under the hood to support that crazy amount of data. Other renderers like Cycles use pretty much comparable physical models for everything and create almost identical output for simple scenes. But most of them would crash and burn spectacularly of they had to deal with scenes at the size these studios produce. [Even though you could theoretically generate a lot of detail, especially textures, algorithmically on the fly, nobody goes for that: the only known good way to band limit textures for level of detail reduction without aliasing artifacts is to sample and filter them - generating the whole texture anyway.]
    - mroche 5y ago
      In the industry, studios will have different tech stacks that make them competitive for different areas. Some will have specialized simulations software for fluid dynamics, others really advanced rigging techniques that allow super realistic results faster than competing studios. A lot of it comes down to custom pipelines and integrations depending on their needs. The off-the-shelf tools have come a long way for a lot of tasks, but studios still create really awesome in house software that in a bidding situation (VFX) can help a bit. Though to be frank the bidding process is an absolute mess. When it comes to rendering, it all depends on the focus of the projects and the direction/needs of the studios. Though the end results may be similar, the way you get there will have varying degrees of optimization and flexibility depending what the stack is built on (besides the typical necessities of traced rendering). Some examples: - Pixar: Renderman - Weta Digital: Manuka [0] - Framestore: Freak [1] [0] https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/manuka/ https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/manuka... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210126083056/https://beforesandafters.com/2020/03/24/meet-freak-framestores-new-in-house-renderer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210126083056/https://beforesan...
- amelius 5y ago
  Just guessing, but perhaps because this page is supposed to be visible only on their intranet?
  - easton 5y ago
    Well, they have hobbyist licensing information on this site and pricing, so it’s for public access.
- donio 5y ago
  I don't think that there is anything to get. It was probably a semi-random submit and the hivemind was in the mood to click on it.
- Chazprime 5y ago
  Training & tutorials for Pixar products used to be notoriously difficult (and expensive) to find, unless you worked at a studio that was paying millions for a site license of prman and engineers to integrate it with your studio pipeline. It appears that Pixar is becoming a little more friendly to solo end users now that there are more rendering choices out there.
osrec 5y ago
If you want to get into 3d art, I would definitely give Blender a look. Literally everything you need in one executable, albeit with a steep learning curve (but that's the case with most 3d software).
- f430 5y ago
  Blender has gotten considerably better. I think it will keep going strong due to the huge Unity crowd. Unreal shops are more likely able to afford commercial licenses on famous software. I argue that Blender is right up there in terms of importance and significance in the OS world. Please consider donating to Blender. I have pledged at least a low 6 digit figure over the past 20 years and I've loved seeing it grow. I don't get any returns obviously just glad I played a small role. https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/ https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/
  - f430 5y ago
    Not sure why people would downvote this. I guess supporting OS with donations is frowned upon here. Meanwhile everybody is more than happy to use free software here. I find this disgusting.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  What I find remarkable about Blender is how much it's used by professionals for side projects. These are the types of people who would be very proficient in Maya and could use it for outside work (for basically nothing last I heard). Given how much the industry relies on open source it's only a matter of time until it gains wider use for big budget work. Edit: I'm mainly talking about what I've seen in VFX here. No idea if this also applies to games.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    From all the artists I talk to, Maya is still much preferred. That said, Blender is still respected. The reputation is that they're fairly close, unlike say, Photoshop and Gimp where many would not even give Gimp a chance.
blowski 5y ago
Khan Academy has a course called "Pixar in a Box". It's aimed at younger people (i.e. 10-15 years old), so the presentation is a bit cheesy, but I learned a lot from watching it. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar
nexuist 5y ago
Pricing is actually surprisingly cheap. I would have thought for sure one license would cost thousands, but it's only around $600. Out of the range of the average hobbyist obviously, but easily acquirable by any small business.
- fctorial 5y ago
  It is not a standalone program. It's a rendering plugin for maya. So the total cost is > 2000$.
- neya 5y ago
  For commercial or non-commercial usage?
  - ptrott2017 5y ago
    Commercial per node. There are also maintenance licenses etc as per most other commercial renderers You can also rent 10 nodes per week fot $50 (for example rendering on multiple nodes in a small render farm) For non-commercial there is a free-non-commercial license so you can learn how to use it at no cost.
    - neya 5y ago
      Thank you for the information.
    - mroche 5y ago
      Also want to toss in that it is free for educational institutions as well. Just reach out to them and verify things and you can get a floating license setup with an agreed upon (iirc) number of licenses). For my university I got 100 licenses (includes 100 separate seats of Tractor, the render queue scheduler) with pretty much no effort, and it (RenderMan) was very easy to setup. Tractor is a different story...
    - jhgb 5y ago
      Renting nodes makes sense these days? I've seen a mailing list post by I think Larry Gritz around 2000 noting that in case of serious productions, bandwidth for assets proportionate to the computational power required or provided would be infeasible for off-premises data centers.

Renderman

78 points by fctorial 5y ago

burlesona 5y ago

I don’t get it. This is a product page for a well known product. What’s noteworthy here?

nvr219 5y ago
Maybe it isn't as well-known as we thought and this is the first time people heard of it.
- orenjacob 5y ago
  That’s certainly possible. But if folks on this site don’t know how ToyStory or JurassicPark were rendered back in the day, let alone like almost every movie with CG in it since, that would be a little surprising. But maybe?
  - zufallsheld 5y ago
    Well, I didn't know until now.
  - 83457 5y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - city41 5y ago
    I never knew Renderman is usable outside of Pixar. It even says free for non-commercial use which is pretty cool.
workOrNah 5y ago
maybe to let ppl know it still exists lol
- Animats 5y ago
  That may be it. Renderman is of historical interest because it introduced shaders to the industry.[1] That's where the look of Pixar's early work comes from. Everybody else texture-mapped photos of the real world, or 2D paintings, while Pixar was generating infinitely fine detail with shader programs. This allowed the camera to get close to objects without the textures going blurry or blocky. Today, shaders run in GPUs, and everybody does this, but in a different way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    The TMS34010 was also quite relevant in what concerns shaders.
sircastor 5y ago
I was under the impression that Renderman was just an internal tool. I didn’t realize they sold it.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I was curious, so checked the Wayback machine. The renderman.pixar.com site has existed since 2005, offering it for sale. I don't know if it was for sale prior to the domain existing: https://web.archive.org/web/20050509112303/https://renderman.pixar.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050509112303/https://renderman...
  - garmaine 5y ago
    It’s been on sale for as long as Pixar has existed. Toy Story was sold to Jobs as a showcase for selling more Renderman instances.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      Exactly this. The critically acclaimed and profitable films are in a sense just adverts for the tool. They're proof that you could not only have an Oscar-winning movie that used this tool for effects, you can make the entire movie with this tool. See also: Disneyland. People really like Disneyland, and it's profitable for Disney, but it's also one enormous advertisement for their products.
      - garmaine 5y ago
        Since Disney and Pixar merged their focus has been on making film franchises and the surrounding merchandise. So it's understandable that most people don't know that wasn't always their focus. When Jobs took over Pixar, he thought they were making a competitor to SGI. They had ambitions to sell not just Renderman licenses, but Renderman hardware. Jobs really wanted them to be a hardware company. They probably saw themselves as occupying the role NVIDIA fills today. The feature film animation studio was sold to Jobs as a way to market their technology, in order to sell more licenses and create the market which would want their (still theoretical) dedicated GPU hardware. Turns out the better play was making an animation studio that would rival and then eventually demolish and replace (via merger and integration) the iconic hand-drawn Disney animation. I suspect the heads of the animation studio within Pixar knew what they were doing though.
bitwize 5y ago
People forget that Pixar is a 3D rendering technology company first and only secondly a film studio. When most people out there hear Pixar, they think Toy Story and Finding Nemo, not even knowing about the technology they developed that makes those movies possible.
- xedeon 5y ago
  Indeed. Ed Catmull (Pixar co-founder) is a pioneer in the 3D/CG space. https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/01/leading-the-way-celebrating-3-memorable-siggraph-leaders.html/ https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/01/leading-the-way-celebratin...
wodenokoto 5y ago
I had no idea that renderman is for sale. I thought renderman was Pixar’s in-house magic juice - the tech that puts them apart kinda thing.
- amelius 5y ago
  How can rendering put a company apart if rendering in just about any tool is already so close to physical reality?
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    The devil is really in the details. Pixar and Disney throw scenes at Renderman for overnight rendering jobs where each node loads up to terabytes of data per frame (geometry, textures, volumes...). So the renderer contains tons of tricky optimizations under the hood to support that crazy amount of data. Other renderers like Cycles use pretty much comparable physical models for everything and create almost identical output for simple scenes. But most of them would crash and burn spectacularly of they had to deal with scenes at the size these studios produce. [Even though you could theoretically generate a lot of detail, especially textures, algorithmically on the fly, nobody goes for that: the only known good way to band limit textures for level of detail reduction without aliasing artifacts is to sample and filter them - generating the whole texture anyway.]
  - mroche 5y ago
    In the industry, studios will have different tech stacks that make them competitive for different areas. Some will have specialized simulations software for fluid dynamics, others really advanced rigging techniques that allow super realistic results faster than competing studios. A lot of it comes down to custom pipelines and integrations depending on their needs. The off-the-shelf tools have come a long way for a lot of tasks, but studios still create really awesome in house software that in a bidding situation (VFX) can help a bit. Though to be frank the bidding process is an absolute mess. When it comes to rendering, it all depends on the focus of the projects and the direction/needs of the studios. Though the end results may be similar, the way you get there will have varying degrees of optimization and flexibility depending what the stack is built on (besides the typical necessities of traced rendering). Some examples: - Pixar: Renderman - Weta Digital: Manuka [0] - Framestore: Freak [1] [0] https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/manuka/ https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/manuka... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210126083056/https://beforesandafters.com/2020/03/24/meet-freak-framestores-new-in-house-renderer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210126083056/https://beforesan...
amelius 5y ago
Just guessing, but perhaps because this page is supposed to be visible only on their intranet?
- easton 5y ago
  Well, they have hobbyist licensing information on this site and pricing, so it’s for public access.
donio 5y ago
I don't think that there is anything to get. It was probably a semi-random submit and the hivemind was in the mood to click on it.
Chazprime 5y ago
Training & tutorials for Pixar products used to be notoriously difficult (and expensive) to find, unless you worked at a studio that was paying millions for a site license of prman and engineers to integrate it with your studio pipeline. It appears that Pixar is becoming a little more friendly to solo end users now that there are more rendering choices out there.

osrec 5y ago

If you want to get into 3d art, I would definitely give Blender a look. Literally everything you need in one executable, albeit with a steep learning curve (but that's the case with most 3d software).

f430 5y ago
Blender has gotten considerably better. I think it will keep going strong due to the huge Unity crowd. Unreal shops are more likely able to afford commercial licenses on famous software. I argue that Blender is right up there in terms of importance and significance in the OS world. Please consider donating to Blender. I have pledged at least a low 6 digit figure over the past 20 years and I've loved seeing it grow. I don't get any returns obviously just glad I played a small role. https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/ https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/
- f430 5y ago
  Not sure why people would downvote this. I guess supporting OS with donations is frowned upon here. Meanwhile everybody is more than happy to use free software here. I find this disgusting.
tjpnz 5y ago
What I find remarkable about Blender is how much it's used by professionals for side projects. These are the types of people who would be very proficient in Maya and could use it for outside work (for basically nothing last I heard). Given how much the industry relies on open source it's only a matter of time until it gains wider use for big budget work. Edit: I'm mainly talking about what I've seen in VFX here. No idea if this also applies to games.
- jayd16 5y ago
  From all the artists I talk to, Maya is still much preferred. That said, Blender is still respected. The reputation is that they're fairly close, unlike say, Photoshop and Gimp where many would not even give Gimp a chance.

blowski 5y ago

Khan Academy has a course called "Pixar in a Box". It's aimed at younger people (i.e. 10-15 years old), so the presentation is a bit cheesy, but I learned a lot from watching it. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar

nexuist 5y ago

Pricing is actually surprisingly cheap. I would have thought for sure one license would cost thousands, but it's only around $600. Out of the range of the average hobbyist obviously, but easily acquirable by any small business.

fctorial 5y ago
It is not a standalone program. It's a rendering plugin for maya. So the total cost is > 2000$.
neya 5y ago
For commercial or non-commercial usage?
- ptrott2017 5y ago
  Commercial per node. There are also maintenance licenses etc as per most other commercial renderers You can also rent 10 nodes per week fot $50 (for example rendering on multiple nodes in a small render farm) For non-commercial there is a free-non-commercial license so you can learn how to use it at no cost.
  - neya 5y ago
    Thank you for the information.
  - mroche 5y ago
    Also want to toss in that it is free for educational institutions as well. Just reach out to them and verify things and you can get a floating license setup with an agreed upon (iirc) number of licenses). For my university I got 100 licenses (includes 100 separate seats of Tractor, the render queue scheduler) with pretty much no effort, and it (RenderMan) was very easy to setup. Tractor is a different story...
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Renting nodes makes sense these days? I've seen a mailing list post by I think Larry Gritz around 2000 noting that in case of serious productions, bandwidth for assets proportionate to the computational power required or provided would be infeasible for off-premises data centers.