8 ms·

RenderMan Price Restructuring

115 points by amock 12y ago

mentaat 12y ago
can it RM be driven programmatically on the server side to do realtime or near realtime rendering?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sitkack 12y ago
> For non-commercial users we are making Renderman free.
anigbrowl 12y ago
At $495 per license and free for non-commercial use, this is a pretty big deal. Interesting to see how Keyshot will respond to this.
- bhouston 12y ago
  KeyShot is more for static product rendering and not the animation market where RenderMan is targeted towards. So I am not sure there is direct competition between the two.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Agreed, but they've been marketing Keyshot at the animation space lately (it's all over their website) and I've heard it labeled as 'poor man's Pixar'.
    - bhouston 12y ago
      Animation for product rendering though: https://www.keyshot.com/3d-animation/ https://www.keyshot.com/3d-animation/
- dickinurass 12y ago
  ain't just big deal .. it's just business buffy
bhouston 12y ago
There are too many mature renderers and the competition is intense. The current popular actively developed ones are: V-Ray (which we use in http://Clara.io http://Clara.io), Arnold, Maxwell, Pixar's RenderMan, and KeyShot. Less popular but actively developed ones are: RedShift, Furry Ball, 3Delight, NVIDIA iRay, Octane/Bridge... And then the ones that are integrated into the 3D packages themselves like Blender's Cycles, Modo's renderer, Cinema 4D's renderer, Houdini's Mantra, Mental Images (included in most Autodesk products.) Then the smaller opensource ones: Sunflow, Lux, Corona, Mitsuba, Pixie... That is a lot of renderers and I am sure that I am missing quite a few.
- sitkack 12y ago
  Do you remember screamline rendering from Intel? Way before its time.
  - bhouston 12y ago
    No way, I didn't even know that existed. Just reading up on it now: http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/intel-screamline-rendering-service/43279 http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/intel-screamli... How did you know about it? I don't think many did. A similar current company is http://ZyncRender.com http://ZyncRender.com, although even today with great bandwidth, cheap cloud computing, and an amazing sync system, they still found it a hard market to crack.
    - sitkack 12y ago
      Because age. While I am programmer, my first love was animation. I had done some cluster computing with thought experiments around huge render farms. When screamline came online a bunch of years later it caught my attention immensely. What a perfect combination of the both! Aside: I tried doing EC2 type stuff in 1999-2001, it was really hard, too much resistance for running anything "sensitive" in the cloud. What a great way for Intel to sidestep the artificial scarcity and release cycles to the world instead of chips! They could prototype new hardware, use "crippled" cpus that they couldn't sell, I thought it was a great vertical integration play that sidestepped many of the ridiculous economic factors at the time. Eventually it will get there when we have massive bandwidth, AMD and Intel if they are still around will sell mostly cycles. I was really bummed to see screamline go out of business. It was like a sad canary.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
OT: So I was in Marin County in 1991, all excited after my interview with Pixar. Drove my rented car back to the airport and hopped on the shuttle to the main terminal. Sat in my seat just as another guy struggled to get a box I recognized as a small computer onto the shuttle. He looked at me and I got up to help him but he had someone he was with who showed up and they lifted the box together. The first guy was Ed Catmull in the video. I recognized him but didn't know what to say and he got into some deep discussion with the guy he was with. I got a job offer from Pixar but turned them down cause my first child was just born and, at the time, I was concerned about Pixar's stability which turned out to be a correct belief back then. Instead, I accepted an offer from Silicon Graphics and sat next to Jim Clark in the lunch room as much as I could.
- GuiA 12y ago
  Do you have any advice for non-graphics programmers (save for a few undergrad/grad classes) who want to get into graphics? (still fairly early in career)
  - MrScruff 12y ago
    Graphics programmer could mean a lot of things. What specifically would you like to be doing?
  - dualogy 12y ago
    Outperforming everyone contributing to shadertoy.com might be a start ;)
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  To add a note, if other readers don't know who Catmull and Clark are, you may have heard of Catmull-Clark subdivision, which is (I think) one of the more interesting geometry algorithms out there, as simple as it is. Pic below: http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Subdivision_method_3/subdivision-teaser.jpg http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Subdivision_method_3/subdivision-...
glifchits 12y ago
I feel like the main takeaway is that they recognized non-commercial use of this crazy expensive software to be legitimate. I think this covers 80% of the use cases where people turn to piracy instead. Good on Pixar. Lets see if Adobe follows suit sometime soon. I know some design students who don't buy a lot of textbooks but have a hole in their pocket from Creative Suite.
- whyenot 12y ago
  >I know some design students who don't buy a lot of textbooks but have a hole in their pocket from Creative Suite. An educational license for Adobe Creative Cloud, which covers virtually all of Adobe's products, is $300 a year. I'm sorry, but if you are in art school and can't afford to pay that there is something very, very wrong and it's not with the price. Many schools even have a site license and you only pay a nominal fee or nothing at all for Adobe CC while enrolled.
  - dickinurass 12y ago
    can you even run photoshop on your rasbperry pi hippie
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Creative Cloud allows you to purchase a valid license for Adobe products for a reasonable monthly fee. For the first time ever, I have a fully legal copy of Photoshop that I pay $10 a month to use (I still mostly use GIMP and ImageMagick though). More specialized software, like Illustrator, is more than that each month (something like $40/mo iirc), but if you need it for school, you can justify it. I think Creative Cloud is cool because it actually makes it reasonable to pay for some Adobe software, and you don't have to sink a bunch of time into cracks, activation workarounds, etc. I don't know if it's going to actually be more profitable for Adobe long-term or not, but as a consumer, I'm excited to see them try something new.
pyrmont 12y ago
It's not mentioned in the text of the post itself, but the $495 price represents a 75% discount on the previous price. A far more detailed overview is here for those interested: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-of-next-25-years/ http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-o...
- berkut 12y ago
  Also less than half the price of Arnold and VRay now... It's possible they were hemorrhaging money thanks to the Arnold and VRay competition over the past few years. Looks like ILM are being "coerced" into using PRMan again from what I hear... But either way, it sounds like either they're willing to take a hit on the profits, or they're expecting to make up for it from renderfarm expansions...
quarterwave 12y ago
When (if at all) will it be feasible for a bunch of kids in a garage to make a feature-length realistic-cgi movie? Assume computing on the public cloud, movie budget $1M.
- ykl 12y ago
  The big cost driver in making animated movies isn't in the software or tools anymore and hasn't been for some time now; the big cost driver is now in authoring all of the assets and content that you actually need. It takes a ton of really talented people to create all of the photorealistic detailed models and animation and whatnot that you need to make a CG movie look convincing. Artists are way more expensive than computers.
  - dualogy 12y ago
    > Artists are way more expensive than computers YC disciples totally need to Disrupt The Heck Out Of That Niche
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  "realistic" is the killer word, which opens your question up to entirely too much interpretation. Toy Story was very realistic for the time. And I think people are routinely generating CGI that looks as nice as Toy Story... they just don't have as good a writing, acting, etc.
VikingCoder 12y ago
There's also RenderMan On Demand, which seemed like an interesting but odd fit: https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/ https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/ Maybe useful if you hit crunch mode, I guess.
VikingCoder 12y ago
So, now that RenderMan is free for non-commercial use, what do people consider to be the contenders for best-in-class free software for modeling, animating, lighting, etc? If you wanted to set up an all-free environment to learn, what's the list of software you would use?
- bhouston 12y ago
  I'm highly biased, but I think our project, http://Clara.io http://Clara.io, is the least hassles for learning the basics. But it is more limited than the other more established programs. http://www.blender.org http://www.blender.org is the primary desktop open source solution.

115 points by amock 12y ago

mentaat 12y ago

can it RM be driven programmatically on the server side to do realtime or near realtime rendering?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sitkack 12y ago

> For non-commercial users we are making Renderman free.

anigbrowl 12y ago

At $495 per license and free for non-commercial use, this is a pretty big deal. Interesting to see how Keyshot will respond to this.

bhouston 12y ago
KeyShot is more for static product rendering and not the animation market where RenderMan is targeted towards. So I am not sure there is direct competition between the two.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Agreed, but they've been marketing Keyshot at the animation space lately (it's all over their website) and I've heard it labeled as 'poor man's Pixar'.
  - bhouston 12y ago
    Animation for product rendering though: https://www.keyshot.com/3d-animation/ https://www.keyshot.com/3d-animation/
dickinurass 12y ago
ain't just big deal .. it's just business buffy

bhouston 12y ago

There are too many mature renderers and the competition is intense. The current popular actively developed ones are: V-Ray (which we use in http://Clara.io http://Clara.io), Arnold, Maxwell, Pixar's RenderMan, and KeyShot. Less popular but actively developed ones are: RedShift, Furry Ball, 3Delight, NVIDIA iRay, Octane/Bridge... And then the ones that are integrated into the 3D packages themselves like Blender's Cycles, Modo's renderer, Cinema 4D's renderer, Houdini's Mantra, Mental Images (included in most Autodesk products.) Then the smaller opensource ones: Sunflow, Lux, Corona, Mitsuba, Pixie... That is a lot of renderers and I am sure that I am missing quite a few.

sitkack 12y ago
Do you remember screamline rendering from Intel? Way before its time.
- bhouston 12y ago
  No way, I didn't even know that existed. Just reading up on it now: http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/intel-screamline-rendering-service/43279 http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/intel-screamli... How did you know about it? I don't think many did. A similar current company is http://ZyncRender.com http://ZyncRender.com, although even today with great bandwidth, cheap cloud computing, and an amazing sync system, they still found it a hard market to crack.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    Because age. While I am programmer, my first love was animation. I had done some cluster computing with thought experiments around huge render farms. When screamline came online a bunch of years later it caught my attention immensely. What a perfect combination of the both! Aside: I tried doing EC2 type stuff in 1999-2001, it was really hard, too much resistance for running anything "sensitive" in the cloud. What a great way for Intel to sidestep the artificial scarcity and release cycles to the world instead of chips! They could prototype new hardware, use "crippled" cpus that they couldn't sell, I thought it was a great vertical integration play that sidestepped many of the ridiculous economic factors at the time. Eventually it will get there when we have massive bandwidth, AMD and Intel if they are still around will sell mostly cycles. I was really bummed to see screamline go out of business. It was like a sad canary.

icantthinkofone 12y ago

OT: So I was in Marin County in 1991, all excited after my interview with Pixar. Drove my rented car back to the airport and hopped on the shuttle to the main terminal. Sat in my seat just as another guy struggled to get a box I recognized as a small computer onto the shuttle. He looked at me and I got up to help him but he had someone he was with who showed up and they lifted the box together. The first guy was Ed Catmull in the video. I recognized him but didn't know what to say and he got into some deep discussion with the guy he was with. I got a job offer from Pixar but turned them down cause my first child was just born and, at the time, I was concerned about Pixar's stability which turned out to be a correct belief back then. Instead, I accepted an offer from Silicon Graphics and sat next to Jim Clark in the lunch room as much as I could.

GuiA 12y ago
Do you have any advice for non-graphics programmers (save for a few undergrad/grad classes) who want to get into graphics? (still fairly early in career)
- MrScruff 12y ago
  Graphics programmer could mean a lot of things. What specifically would you like to be doing?
- dualogy 12y ago
  Outperforming everyone contributing to shadertoy.com might be a start ;)
gavanwoolery 12y ago
To add a note, if other readers don't know who Catmull and Clark are, you may have heard of Catmull-Clark subdivision, which is (I think) one of the more interesting geometry algorithms out there, as simple as it is. Pic below: http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Subdivision_method_3/subdivision-teaser.jpg http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Subdivision_method_3/subdivision-...

glifchits 12y ago

I feel like the main takeaway is that they recognized non-commercial use of this crazy expensive software to be legitimate. I think this covers 80% of the use cases where people turn to piracy instead. Good on Pixar. Lets see if Adobe follows suit sometime soon. I know some design students who don't buy a lot of textbooks but have a hole in their pocket from Creative Suite.

whyenot 12y ago
>I know some design students who don't buy a lot of textbooks but have a hole in their pocket from Creative Suite. An educational license for Adobe Creative Cloud, which covers virtually all of Adobe's products, is $300 a year. I'm sorry, but if you are in art school and can't afford to pay that there is something very, very wrong and it's not with the price. Many schools even have a site license and you only pay a nominal fee or nothing at all for Adobe CC while enrolled.
- dickinurass 12y ago
  can you even run photoshop on your rasbperry pi hippie
cookiecaper 12y ago
Creative Cloud allows you to purchase a valid license for Adobe products for a reasonable monthly fee. For the first time ever, I have a fully legal copy of Photoshop that I pay $10 a month to use (I still mostly use GIMP and ImageMagick though). More specialized software, like Illustrator, is more than that each month (something like $40/mo iirc), but if you need it for school, you can justify it. I think Creative Cloud is cool because it actually makes it reasonable to pay for some Adobe software, and you don't have to sink a bunch of time into cracks, activation workarounds, etc. I don't know if it's going to actually be more profitable for Adobe long-term or not, but as a consumer, I'm excited to see them try something new.

pyrmont 12y ago

It's not mentioned in the text of the post itself, but the $495 price represents a 75% discount on the previous price. A far more detailed overview is here for those interested: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-of-next-25-years/ http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-o...

berkut 12y ago
Also less than half the price of Arnold and VRay now... It's possible they were hemorrhaging money thanks to the Arnold and VRay competition over the past few years. Looks like ILM are being "coerced" into using PRMan again from what I hear... But either way, it sounds like either they're willing to take a hit on the profits, or they're expecting to make up for it from renderfarm expansions...

quarterwave 12y ago

When (if at all) will it be feasible for a bunch of kids in a garage to make a feature-length realistic-cgi movie? Assume computing on the public cloud, movie budget $1M.

ykl 12y ago
The big cost driver in making animated movies isn't in the software or tools anymore and hasn't been for some time now; the big cost driver is now in authoring all of the assets and content that you actually need. It takes a ton of really talented people to create all of the photorealistic detailed models and animation and whatnot that you need to make a CG movie look convincing. Artists are way more expensive than computers.
- dualogy 12y ago
  > Artists are way more expensive than computers YC disciples totally need to Disrupt The Heck Out Of That Niche
VikingCoder 12y ago
"realistic" is the killer word, which opens your question up to entirely too much interpretation. Toy Story was very realistic for the time. And I think people are routinely generating CGI that looks as nice as Toy Story... they just don't have as good a writing, acting, etc.

VikingCoder 12y ago

There's also RenderMan On Demand, which seemed like an interesting but odd fit: https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/ https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/ Maybe useful if you hit crunch mode, I guess.

VikingCoder 12y ago

So, now that RenderMan is free for non-commercial use, what do people consider to be the contenders for best-in-class free software for modeling, animating, lighting, etc? If you wanted to set up an all-free environment to learn, what's the list of software you would use?

bhouston 12y ago
I'm highly biased, but I think our project, http://Clara.io http://Clara.io, is the least hassles for learning the basics. But it is more limited than the other more established programs. http://www.blender.org http://www.blender.org is the primary desktop open source solution.