9 ms·

Intro to RenderMan for Blender

138 points by mariuz 11y ago

imaginenore 11y ago
It gives me no reasons to use it over the standard Cycles renderer.
- eggy 11y ago
  Not even for all of the available shaders, books, tutorials and other resources made available for it over the years? The analogy I make is a programming language that is so-so, but has a hundred relevant, useful libraries vs. the technically better language with hardly any libraries. Cycles has the basic building blocks to create a library of pre-defined shaders, but Renderman has over 25 years of history, and tons of RSL examples.
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    Show me just one really cool thing that can be done with Renderman and can't be done with Cycles. Show off that 25 years of history.
    - ykl 11y ago
      Any movie by Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Double Negative, Framestore, Weta, etc. Alternatively, a brief and by no means comprehensive list of things I've found to be better in Renderman versus Cycles: * Bidirectional pathtracing and VCM for fast, accurate caustics and SDS (specular-diffuse-specular) illumination without fireflies. [0][1] * Extremely efficient subdivision surfaces and displacement. In Cycles, there is a performance penalty for subdivs and displacement. In Renderman, there is almost zero overhead. [2][3] * Significantly faster subsurface scattering [4][5] * Support for OpenVDB volumes, and much faster volume rendering/scattering/etc. [6][7] * Importance sampling for emissive effects, such as explosions and flames. Think candles with actual fire that don't firefly! [8] * Importance sampling of HDR maps (basically, prevents fireflies when using HDR maps) [9] * Much better memory efficiency. Renderman is designed to handle literally hundreds of gigs of stuff in memory going in and out of core all the time. Don't have a link for this one, since this comes mostly from experience with both renderers and having used Renderman in a large production studio. * Disney "principled" BSDF [10] * Arbitrary geometry lights, with importance sampling [11] * Better/faster hair rendering and hair shaders [12][13][14] * The Denoiser is PRMan 20 is legitimately magic. [15][16] Generally, there isn't necessarily any particular feature that Renderman has that Cycles is outright missing, but almost everything in Renderman is a lot faster and more optimized (as seen in the link list below, a lot of the research on making stuff like subsurface scattering and hair and whatnot extremely fast comes from Pixar and the Renderman devs/researchers in the first place). On the flip side, Cycles has a usable GPU mode, whereas I doubt Renderman will ever get a GPU mode anytime soon. Cycles is really pretty great, but having a volunteer team versus a dedicated, paid team that has to support not just Pixar's production studio but also a ton of large VFX houses produces a much faster development pace and a much higher incentive to optimize the crap out of every inch of Renderman. Disclaimer: I now work for a different production renderer team at a different studio (some consider us to be a rival to Renderman, we don't see it quite that way), but I've worked at Pixar before. [0] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrVCM.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrVC... [1] http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/2012-vcm-paper.pdf http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/2012-vcm-pa... [2] http://renderman.pixar.com/view/displacements http://renderman.pixar.com/view/displacements [3] http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/intro.html http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/intro.html [4] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ApproxBSSRDF/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ApproxBSSRDF/paper.pdf [5] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PhotonBeamDiffusion/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PhotonBeamDiffusion/paper.... [6] http://www.openvdb.org/ http://www.openvdb.org/ [7] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/rfmOpenVDB.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/rfmOp... [8] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MISEmissive/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MISEmissive/paper.pdf [9] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrStdEnvMapLight.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrSt... [10] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrDisney.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrDi... [11] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risLighting.html#shapes http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risLi... [12] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrMarschnerHair.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrMa... [13] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/DataDrivenHairScattering/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/DataDrivenHairScattering/p... [14] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ImportanceSamplingHair/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ImportanceSamplingHair/pap... [15] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risDenoise.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risDe... [16] https://renderman.pixar.com/view/denoiser https://renderman.pixar.com/view/denoiser
      - imaginenore 11y ago
        I'm pretty sure every movie company you named could have rendered the same thing in Cycles just fine. You still can't name a single important thing that can't be done with Cycles. Speed is good, but you cherry picked some niche thing that's probably faster than Cycles (which you haven't provided evidence for). That's a silly argument. EDIT: Thanks for the updated post, much more substance.
        justizin 11y ago
        > I'm pretty sure every movie company you named could have rendered the same thing in Cycles just fine. Movies aren't made by software, they're made by massive teams of people who share overlapping expertise. Do you want to write Lua for Kerbal Space Program, or Perl for NASA?
        ykl 11y ago
        Post updated with detailed list and links for each list item. At studios I've been at, we did tests with various renderers. Sure, we could have rendered a film in Cycles, but it would have taken much longer.
        jlarocco 11y ago
        The burden of proof here is on Cycles. There's 30 years of history showing off Renderman, and everybody in the CG industry knows that it's awesome. Not many people have even heard of Cycles. What movies have used it? Why is it better than the existing rendering software? Is it compatible with the Renderman spec? How easy is it to set up a render farm with it?
        ykl 11y ago
        This. In theory Cycles can be used to make the same kind of movies Renderman can. Please name a few examples of cases where this was done. On the flipside, when people say Renderman can be used to make production level stuff, they can point to literally any film with CG made in the past 25 years as evidence.
        11y ago
    - eggy 11y ago
      I didn't say anything could or could not be done with Cycles. I said there were 'tons of RSL examples'. Do you understand the significance of a history, and body of work available to start with, and not having to start from scratch? I was using BMRT in the 90s, and reading books about procedurally-generated textures. People wrote so many shaders in RSL, most available for you to copy, modify and re-use. I am assuming there are not nearly as many OSL examples as RSL examples or samples of code. I may be wrong. For the record, I'll use both, and I am happy to see Renderman as an option. I am particularly interested in OSL as a corollary to RSL. Sony used it successfully to counter Pixar's mention here. I am also eager to test my RSL chops again too!
      - solidangle 11y ago
        Most of those shaders written back then are pretty much worthless now that Renderman has introduced RIS mode (instead of REYES mode), which was introduced last year. Pixar recommends writing shaders in C++ now instead of in RSL, as C++ shaders are just way more performant right now. OSL is pretty mature, I know that both Sony Pictures Imageworks and Double Negative use it in production. Now that Renderman also support OSL I'm pretty sure we're going to see OSL examples posted online. OSL shaders are awesome compared to RSL shaders, as OSL gives all control to the renderer, which allows it to do a lot of optimization (such as using the renderers own importance sampling strategies).
        eggy 11y ago
        Thanks, I'll have to look even more into OSL (vs. GSL or RSL). I would hardly use the word 'worthless' just because RIS mode was introduced last year. The basics of what the prodecurally generated textures book taught me back then, still apply. Geometry, math, building up patterns in software, etc... Not to mention, the basis of such shaders just need to be translated just as GSL can be relatively simple to translate into OSL as the videos by Thomas Dinges show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQXjIDWtz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQXjIDWtz0
    - berkut 11y ago
      http://renderman.pixar.com/view/movies-and-awards http://renderman.pixar.com/view/movies-and-awards Although it should be pointed out PRMan wasn't the only renderer used for quite a few of these movies (definitely the later ones) - multiple studios work on movies these days, and other renderers like Arnold and VRay until a year ago were very close to knocking Pixar completely out of the market (even ILM switched to using Arnold for a couple of years).
jetskindo 11y ago
I know everyone is excited about this but I would like to see the benefits of using it over cycles. So far I must say cycles is pretty great
- mathnode 11y ago
  Rendering, is a job in itself. There are people who do nothing but develop looks and write shaders all day everyday, and others who create and manage distributed rendering pipelines. Cycles is great, but just like Mental Ray, in other applications, it's part of another package. Sure you can run them headless, but why? When there is something that is made for it that is so well documented and has great support solely for that purpose. Rendering features aside, it's a great business and architecture choice.
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    You realize you didn't name a single benefit over Cycles?
    - mikebelanger 11y ago
      Two benefits were named: 1. Deciding to go with renderman gives allows you to tap a large talent pool that are already familiar with Renderman. Much larger than cycles. 2. Renderman works with a number of other 3d tools besides Blender. Cycles could work with other software, but I suspect this is a relatively niche group doing so. This means that other pieces of software could be used in conjunction with Blender.
      - justizin 11y ago
        Another way of putting it is that you can get a job working with Renderman. What's really huge here is being able to interface open-source software with the commercial rendering pipeline that is used to make most of the movies we watch. I had a big fight with my 3d modeling instructor who made us use 3ds max because he wrote the Adobe Press book on it, though he not very subtly suggested that we would have to pirate it in order to do our homework. I pushed really hard to be allowed to do work in Blender, wasn't a win at the time, but I think this is clearly the direction things will go - the days of paying thousands of dollars for content creating software that is primarily used by a handful of companies are numbered. Companies like Pixar and ILM should be contributing to projects like Blender instead of developing proprietary internal tools and marrying themselves to packages like Maya that aren't terribly better than Blender, if they even are better at all anymore. Blender has some quirks, esp in modeling from what I remember, but it's solid, and more importantly, there are room for lots of tools, just not lots of tools that break the bank. This is a hobby for everyone it's not a profession for, and even the professionals are often contractors who struggle to maintain a toolkit. Anyway, <3 Blender. :)
julius 11y ago
Any links to a good comparison of RenderMan vs. Cycles? Performance would be nice to know.
mkesper 11y ago
RenderMan is now free for all non-commercial purposes, including evaluations, education, research, and personal projects. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation. For further details please refer to Pixar's Non-Commercial RenderMan FAQ. http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849 http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849 So this is non-free.
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  You can also post renderings / videos you make to sites like YouTube and legally make money off of advertising.
  - remotebug 11y ago
    Indeed, that is explicitly permitted. Weird how they consider it indirect. Reading through 11) I thought indirect meant other things.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Its indirect to their business model, and will just mean more talent ready to go for those buying it for movies / tv production.
- kelnos 11y ago
  Free as in beer, at least. I see no problem with that. Good on Pixar for doing some good. Just because they fall short of some sort of arbitrary ideal, it doesn't mean they're bad people or that this licensing method is a useless gesture.
manishsharan 11y ago
Can someone please advise me how to get started with this stuff? I have been developing enterprise applications which is boring to all kids, including my nieces and nephews. I wish I could something with Blender etc. to impress those kids. I have found the documentation to be too intimidating for an absolute newbie. I am looking for a dummies guide for rendering. I am not looking to change careers; just want to pursue this to get an understanding and hook those kids into programming.
- beering 11y ago
  There are a gazillion YouTube tutorials for Blender showing you how to make some very cool stuff. Some of the newer tutorials using Blender's Cycles renderer creates photorealistic images without much effort. Just make sure that you get recent tutorials - there is probably stuff from pre-2.5 Blender floating around that would be confusing to anyone using newer versions.
- Buetol 11y ago
  You can follow the official Blender getting-started guide: https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/ https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/ The CG Cookie tutorial especially: https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-basics/ https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-basics/
  - slavik81 11y ago
    I second the CG Cookie tutorials. Knowing nothing about Blender and little about 3D animation, I started watching tutorials on a Monday afternoon and finished rendering early Thursday morning, though I did little else besides work, attend class and sleep those days. It should give you an idea of the sort of animation you can expect to achieve in your first week. The only thing I didn't make myself was the wood texture. https://youtu.be/YrvfTPx4JlM https://youtu.be/YrvfTPx4JlM
- elektromekatron 11y ago
  Come up with an idea to work towards. Like making a model of a favourite toy from when you were a kid. Then trawl documentation and tutorials towards doing that. Then repeat the exercise with something more complicated. Keep doing this relentlessly and you will get good surprisingly quickly.
yarrel 11y ago
Blender is winning.

138 points by mariuz 11y ago

imaginenore 11y ago

It gives me no reasons to use it over the standard Cycles renderer.

eggy 11y ago
Not even for all of the available shaders, books, tutorials and other resources made available for it over the years? The analogy I make is a programming language that is so-so, but has a hundred relevant, useful libraries vs. the technically better language with hardly any libraries. Cycles has the basic building blocks to create a library of pre-defined shaders, but Renderman has over 25 years of history, and tons of RSL examples.
- imaginenore 11y ago
  Show me just one really cool thing that can be done with Renderman and can't be done with Cycles. Show off that 25 years of history.
  - ykl 11y ago
    Any movie by Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Double Negative, Framestore, Weta, etc. Alternatively, a brief and by no means comprehensive list of things I've found to be better in Renderman versus Cycles: * Bidirectional pathtracing and VCM for fast, accurate caustics and SDS (specular-diffuse-specular) illumination without fireflies. [0][1] * Extremely efficient subdivision surfaces and displacement. In Cycles, there is a performance penalty for subdivs and displacement. In Renderman, there is almost zero overhead. [2][3] * Significantly faster subsurface scattering [4][5] * Support for OpenVDB volumes, and much faster volume rendering/scattering/etc. [6][7] * Importance sampling for emissive effects, such as explosions and flames. Think candles with actual fire that don't firefly! [8] * Importance sampling of HDR maps (basically, prevents fireflies when using HDR maps) [9] * Much better memory efficiency. Renderman is designed to handle literally hundreds of gigs of stuff in memory going in and out of core all the time. Don't have a link for this one, since this comes mostly from experience with both renderers and having used Renderman in a large production studio. * Disney "principled" BSDF [10] * Arbitrary geometry lights, with importance sampling [11] * Better/faster hair rendering and hair shaders [12][13][14] * The Denoiser is PRMan 20 is legitimately magic. [15][16] Generally, there isn't necessarily any particular feature that Renderman has that Cycles is outright missing, but almost everything in Renderman is a lot faster and more optimized (as seen in the link list below, a lot of the research on making stuff like subsurface scattering and hair and whatnot extremely fast comes from Pixar and the Renderman devs/researchers in the first place). On the flip side, Cycles has a usable GPU mode, whereas I doubt Renderman will ever get a GPU mode anytime soon. Cycles is really pretty great, but having a volunteer team versus a dedicated, paid team that has to support not just Pixar's production studio but also a ton of large VFX houses produces a much faster development pace and a much higher incentive to optimize the crap out of every inch of Renderman. Disclaimer: I now work for a different production renderer team at a different studio (some consider us to be a rival to Renderman, we don't see it quite that way), but I've worked at Pixar before. [0] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrVCM.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrVC... [1] http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/2012-vcm-paper.pdf http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/2012-vcm-pa... [2] http://renderman.pixar.com/view/displacements http://renderman.pixar.com/view/displacements [3] http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/intro.html http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/intro.html [4] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ApproxBSSRDF/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ApproxBSSRDF/paper.pdf [5] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PhotonBeamDiffusion/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PhotonBeamDiffusion/paper.... [6] http://www.openvdb.org/ http://www.openvdb.org/ [7] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/rfmOpenVDB.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/rfmOp... [8] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MISEmissive/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MISEmissive/paper.pdf [9] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrStdEnvMapLight.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrSt... [10] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrDisney.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrDi... [11] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risLighting.html#shapes http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risLi... [12] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrMarschnerHair.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/PxrMa... [13] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/DataDrivenHairScattering/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/DataDrivenHairScattering/p... [14] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ImportanceSamplingHair/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ImportanceSamplingHair/pap... [15] http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risDenoise.html http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/RenderMan/risDe... [16] https://renderman.pixar.com/view/denoiser https://renderman.pixar.com/view/denoiser
    - imaginenore 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure every movie company you named could have rendered the same thing in Cycles just fine. You still can't name a single important thing that can't be done with Cycles. Speed is good, but you cherry picked some niche thing that's probably faster than Cycles (which you haven't provided evidence for). That's a silly argument. EDIT: Thanks for the updated post, much more substance.
      - justizin 11y ago
        > I'm pretty sure every movie company you named could have rendered the same thing in Cycles just fine. Movies aren't made by software, they're made by massive teams of people who share overlapping expertise. Do you want to write Lua for Kerbal Space Program, or Perl for NASA?
      - ykl 11y ago
        Post updated with detailed list and links for each list item. At studios I've been at, we did tests with various renderers. Sure, we could have rendered a film in Cycles, but it would have taken much longer.
      - jlarocco 11y ago
        The burden of proof here is on Cycles. There's 30 years of history showing off Renderman, and everybody in the CG industry knows that it's awesome. Not many people have even heard of Cycles. What movies have used it? Why is it better than the existing rendering software? Is it compatible with the Renderman spec? How easy is it to set up a render farm with it?
        ykl 11y ago
        This. In theory Cycles can be used to make the same kind of movies Renderman can. Please name a few examples of cases where this was done. On the flipside, when people say Renderman can be used to make production level stuff, they can point to literally any film with CG made in the past 25 years as evidence.
      - 11y ago
  - eggy 11y ago
    I didn't say anything could or could not be done with Cycles. I said there were 'tons of RSL examples'. Do you understand the significance of a history, and body of work available to start with, and not having to start from scratch? I was using BMRT in the 90s, and reading books about procedurally-generated textures. People wrote so many shaders in RSL, most available for you to copy, modify and re-use. I am assuming there are not nearly as many OSL examples as RSL examples or samples of code. I may be wrong. For the record, I'll use both, and I am happy to see Renderman as an option. I am particularly interested in OSL as a corollary to RSL. Sony used it successfully to counter Pixar's mention here. I am also eager to test my RSL chops again too!
    - solidangle 11y ago
      Most of those shaders written back then are pretty much worthless now that Renderman has introduced RIS mode (instead of REYES mode), which was introduced last year. Pixar recommends writing shaders in C++ now instead of in RSL, as C++ shaders are just way more performant right now. OSL is pretty mature, I know that both Sony Pictures Imageworks and Double Negative use it in production. Now that Renderman also support OSL I'm pretty sure we're going to see OSL examples posted online. OSL shaders are awesome compared to RSL shaders, as OSL gives all control to the renderer, which allows it to do a lot of optimization (such as using the renderers own importance sampling strategies).
      - eggy 11y ago
        Thanks, I'll have to look even more into OSL (vs. GSL or RSL). I would hardly use the word 'worthless' just because RIS mode was introduced last year. The basics of what the prodecurally generated textures book taught me back then, still apply. Geometry, math, building up patterns in software, etc... Not to mention, the basis of such shaders just need to be translated just as GSL can be relatively simple to translate into OSL as the videos by Thomas Dinges show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQXjIDWtz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQXjIDWtz0
  - berkut 11y ago
    http://renderman.pixar.com/view/movies-and-awards http://renderman.pixar.com/view/movies-and-awards Although it should be pointed out PRMan wasn't the only renderer used for quite a few of these movies (definitely the later ones) - multiple studios work on movies these days, and other renderers like Arnold and VRay until a year ago were very close to knocking Pixar completely out of the market (even ILM switched to using Arnold for a couple of years).

jetskindo 11y ago

I know everyone is excited about this but I would like to see the benefits of using it over cycles. So far I must say cycles is pretty great

mathnode 11y ago
Rendering, is a job in itself. There are people who do nothing but develop looks and write shaders all day everyday, and others who create and manage distributed rendering pipelines. Cycles is great, but just like Mental Ray, in other applications, it's part of another package. Sure you can run them headless, but why? When there is something that is made for it that is so well documented and has great support solely for that purpose. Rendering features aside, it's a great business and architecture choice.
- imaginenore 11y ago
  You realize you didn't name a single benefit over Cycles?
  - mikebelanger 11y ago
    Two benefits were named: 1. Deciding to go with renderman gives allows you to tap a large talent pool that are already familiar with Renderman. Much larger than cycles. 2. Renderman works with a number of other 3d tools besides Blender. Cycles could work with other software, but I suspect this is a relatively niche group doing so. This means that other pieces of software could be used in conjunction with Blender.
    - justizin 11y ago
      Another way of putting it is that you can get a job working with Renderman. What's really huge here is being able to interface open-source software with the commercial rendering pipeline that is used to make most of the movies we watch. I had a big fight with my 3d modeling instructor who made us use 3ds max because he wrote the Adobe Press book on it, though he not very subtly suggested that we would have to pirate it in order to do our homework. I pushed really hard to be allowed to do work in Blender, wasn't a win at the time, but I think this is clearly the direction things will go - the days of paying thousands of dollars for content creating software that is primarily used by a handful of companies are numbered. Companies like Pixar and ILM should be contributing to projects like Blender instead of developing proprietary internal tools and marrying themselves to packages like Maya that aren't terribly better than Blender, if they even are better at all anymore. Blender has some quirks, esp in modeling from what I remember, but it's solid, and more importantly, there are room for lots of tools, just not lots of tools that break the bank. This is a hobby for everyone it's not a profession for, and even the professionals are often contractors who struggle to maintain a toolkit. Anyway, <3 Blender. :)

julius 11y ago

Any links to a good comparison of RenderMan vs. Cycles? Performance would be nice to know.

mkesper 11y ago

RenderMan is now free for all non-commercial purposes, including evaluations, education, research, and personal projects. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation. For further details please refer to Pixar's Non-Commercial RenderMan FAQ. http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849 http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849 So this is non-free.

VikingCoder 11y ago
You can also post renderings / videos you make to sites like YouTube and legally make money off of advertising.
- remotebug 11y ago
  Indeed, that is explicitly permitted. Weird how they consider it indirect. Reading through 11) I thought indirect meant other things.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Its indirect to their business model, and will just mean more talent ready to go for those buying it for movies / tv production.
kelnos 11y ago
Free as in beer, at least. I see no problem with that. Good on Pixar for doing some good. Just because they fall short of some sort of arbitrary ideal, it doesn't mean they're bad people or that this licensing method is a useless gesture.

manishsharan 11y ago

Can someone please advise me how to get started with this stuff? I have been developing enterprise applications which is boring to all kids, including my nieces and nephews. I wish I could something with Blender etc. to impress those kids. I have found the documentation to be too intimidating for an absolute newbie. I am looking for a dummies guide for rendering. I am not looking to change careers; just want to pursue this to get an understanding and hook those kids into programming.

beering 11y ago
There are a gazillion YouTube tutorials for Blender showing you how to make some very cool stuff. Some of the newer tutorials using Blender's Cycles renderer creates photorealistic images without much effort. Just make sure that you get recent tutorials - there is probably stuff from pre-2.5 Blender floating around that would be confusing to anyone using newer versions.
Buetol 11y ago
You can follow the official Blender getting-started guide: https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/ https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/ The CG Cookie tutorial especially: https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-basics/ https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-basics/
- slavik81 11y ago
  I second the CG Cookie tutorials. Knowing nothing about Blender and little about 3D animation, I started watching tutorials on a Monday afternoon and finished rendering early Thursday morning, though I did little else besides work, attend class and sleep those days. It should give you an idea of the sort of animation you can expect to achieve in your first week. The only thing I didn't make myself was the wood texture. https://youtu.be/YrvfTPx4JlM https://youtu.be/YrvfTPx4JlM
elektromekatron 11y ago
Come up with an idea to work towards. Like making a model of a favourite toy from when you were a kid. Then trawl documentation and tutorials towards doing that. Then repeat the exercise with something more complicated. Keep doing this relentlessly and you will get good surprisingly quickly.

yarrel 11y ago

Blender is winning.