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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 distribute

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. :)
    - byroniczero 11y ago
      Autodesk recently made their software (including 3ds Max and Maya) free for educational/non-commercial use for 3 years. No watermarks or other restrictions. http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2014/10/students-teachers-schools-worldwide-can-now-download-free-full-version-autodesk-software-no-catch.html http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2014/10/students...
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      I used 3ds Max to do part of my thesis project. I just installed the 30-day trial on different machines in the computer lab by turns. :)
      - e12e 11y ago
        I'm not sure why you think circumventing the license poorly is any better than using cracked software. I won't call it theft (I don't think illegal copying should be considered theft) -- but I also don't see any meaningful distinction between how you break the license and use software you haven't paid for.
    - CyberDildonics 11y ago
      > 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. For anyone who might think the same thing: 1. This is not going to happen anytime soon. 2. The tools they use, proprietary or not, are better than blender. I know everyone loves to rally around open source software and Blender has benefited lots of people for a variety of reasons, but high end visual effects is not its place right now. 3. The large 3D programs are actually used by an enormous amount of people these days, not just the big VFX companies.
      - solidangle 11y ago
        This is already happening: - Sony Pictures Imageworks open sourced Open Shading Language, Field3D, Alembic and OpenColorIO. - Pixar opensourced OpenSubDiv - Disney opensourced Ptex, BRDF Explorer, SeExpr and Partio - Dreamworks open sourced OpenVDB I wouldn't be too suprised if we would see an open source renderer within the next 10 years, especially if SPI is going to replace their in-house version of the Arnold renderer, as open source software has been extremely successful for SPI.
- KaiserPro 11y ago
  Its faster, there is a massive wealth of knowledge out there, plus you can do wonderfully fancy thing like interactive rendering.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  It isn't even up for debate among anyone with in depth rendering knowledge. Cycles is free. That's the extent of its advantage. Renderman is faster, far more flexible, has true layered shaders, handles volumetrics, lots of geometry types, displacement, ptex textures, has better integrators, AOVs, a shading language, a detailed API, light path expressions... There are probably twice as many things I can't think of at the moment.

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. :)
  - byroniczero 11y ago
    Autodesk recently made their software (including 3ds Max and Maya) free for educational/non-commercial use for 3 years. No watermarks or other restrictions. http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2014/10/students-teachers-schools-worldwide-can-now-download-free-full-version-autodesk-software-no-catch.html http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2014/10/students...
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    I used 3ds Max to do part of my thesis project. I just installed the 30-day trial on different machines in the computer lab by turns. :)
    - e12e 11y ago
      I'm not sure why you think circumventing the license poorly is any better than using cracked software. I won't call it theft (I don't think illegal copying should be considered theft) -- but I also don't see any meaningful distinction between how you break the license and use software you haven't paid for.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    > 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. For anyone who might think the same thing: 1. This is not going to happen anytime soon. 2. The tools they use, proprietary or not, are better than blender. I know everyone loves to rally around open source software and Blender has benefited lots of people for a variety of reasons, but high end visual effects is not its place right now. 3. The large 3D programs are actually used by an enormous amount of people these days, not just the big VFX companies.
    - solidangle 11y ago
      This is already happening: - Sony Pictures Imageworks open sourced Open Shading Language, Field3D, Alembic and OpenColorIO. - Pixar opensourced OpenSubDiv - Disney opensourced Ptex, BRDF Explorer, SeExpr and Partio - Dreamworks open sourced OpenVDB I wouldn't be too suprised if we would see an open source renderer within the next 10 years, especially if SPI is going to replace their in-house version of the Arnold renderer, as open source software has been extremely successful for SPI.
KaiserPro 11y ago
Its faster, there is a massive wealth of knowledge out there, plus you can do wonderfully fancy thing like interactive rendering.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
It isn't even up for debate among anyone with in depth rendering knowledge. Cycles is free. That's the extent of its advantage. Renderman is faster, far more flexible, has true layered shaders, handles volumetrics, lots of geometry types, displacement, ptex textures, has better integrators, AOVs, a shading language, a detailed API, light path expressions... There are probably twice as many things I can't think of at the moment.