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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 avera

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 6y ago
It is not a standalone program. It's a rendering plugin for maya. So the total cost is > 2000$.
neya 6y ago
For commercial or non-commercial usage?
- ptrott2017 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
boulos 6y ago
It used to be a lot more expensive! IIRC, they had a per thread-ish licensing scheme for a while (maybe blocks of 4 or 8 threads?). Lots of software did in the late 2000s. Then a few years ago, to stem the tide from Arnold (which was 1000 euros per node), they lowered their price to this current $600 price point and free for academic/non-commercial. They kept MPC/Technicolor and ILM as well as many smaller shops, but the other major studios either have their own renderer (including Disney Animation!) or use Arnold.

fctorial 6y ago

It is not a standalone program. It's a rendering plugin for maya. So the total cost is > 2000$.

neya 6y ago

For commercial or non-commercial usage?

ptrott2017 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

boulos 6y ago

It used to be a lot more expensive! IIRC, they had a per thread-ish licensing scheme for a while (maybe blocks of 4 or 8 threads?). Lots of software did in the late 2000s. Then a few years ago, to stem the tide from Arnold (which was 1000 euros per node), they lowered their price to this current $600 price point and free for academic/non-commercial. They kept MPC/Technicolor and ILM as well as many smaller shops, but the other major studios either have their own renderer (including Disney Animation!) or use Arnold.