Sign in / up

back to article Pixar frees its production-grade RenderMan software

Pixar Animation Studios has decided to give away RenderMan, its flagship animation software used to create the likes of Toy Story, Wall-E and – less happily – Cars 2. The company decided on the freebie, which will apply only to non-commercial use, after last week releasing a new version of the software said to offer “ an …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. John Tserkezis

    It's would be noteworthy, that the educational and free versions of RenderMan (the next release) isn't available yet.

    As always, it'll be Real Soon Now.

    It's also noteworthy (unless it's because I've never done any commercial grade graphics) that they don't have system requirements or anything even close to that. So if one just plans to "play with it" we have no idea if it's x86, IA64, ARM, iThingy (whichever variation) or a bloody Atari (or even a bank of them).

    0 7
    1. Novex
      Reply Icon

      From the link in the article:

      "The new RenderMan is being released in the timeframe of SIGGRAPH 2014 and will be compatible with the following 64-bit operating systems, Mac OS 10.8 and 10.7, Windows 8, 7, and Vista, and Linux. Autodesk Maya compatibility is with versions 2013, 2013.5, 2014, and 2015. Pixar’s annual maintenance program benefits customers with access to ongoing support and free upgrades."

      6 0
    2. JeffyPoooh
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      JeffyPooh's Law of Software Pricing

      You think hardware is getting cheap? Watch software prices trend towards zero!

      0 0
  2. B-D

    Is it me or did

    Rule 34 suddenly just get a lot more real?

    4 0
    1. John Tserkezis
      Reply Icon

      Re: Is it me or did

      "Rule 34 suddenly just get a lot more real?"

      I don't think so. If animation was sellable in that genre, then someone would have already done it and sold it in spades. Why would you need to pay people to demean themselves doing for real in front of cameras, when you can have digital animation engineers do it for you? In the comfort of their own bedrooms no less.

      1 4
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Joke

        Re: Is it me or did

        I think if they came out with RenderWoman, the porn industry might adopt the program.

        On the other hand, if it'll run on IBM's Watson, and in the U.S., companies are people, the next presidential election should be a doosie.

        3 0
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Is it me or did

          When I wrote my dissertation on the pornographic industry, the animated side of porn already had CGI dedicated sites and that was a good 10 year ago, so I'm sure there are many more now.

          1 0
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Is it me or did

            Exactly. You might want to look up Jag27 - I assure you he didn't render all that stuff for free. Niche? Sure, but a bloody old one...

            0 0
  3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    The economics

    >With RenderMan selling for just $US495 it's hard to see why Pixar cares

    > can you explain what's afoot here?

    Pixar aren't in the software selling business, they are in the movie making business

    Renderman operators are expensive.

    If every highschool kid and every art college start using Renderman there will be a lot of potential recruits. A glut reduces prices

    It's the same reason ATT made C free, they needed to hire programmers.

    26 0
    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: The economics

      Or they could be evolving to a module architecture the way Daz 3D is now. Their studio is free, but if you want to do anything serious with it, you're going to need one or ten different modules to go along with it...

      0 4
      1. djack
        Reply Icon

        Re: The economics

        From what (little) I know of RenderMan, it is a rendering suite and a very flexible one. It is not a modelling or animation tool, you (can) throw the models and scenes you produce in those tools into RenderMan to get your pretty pictures.

        1 1
  4. Faye B

    Any development tool is useless and pointlessly expensive if you don't have any developers using it. This freebie allows more animators to get skilled with the tool (much like learning to use a pencil or paintbrush) so that Pixar have a bigger pool of ready to go resources when the next film comes along. Shaving even a day or two off the start up time is worth the price of a seat.

    2 0
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    PRMan in recent versions appears to have alienated enough people that it is no longer the automatic default for rendering. Pacific Rim (rendered at a company that has effectively free Pixar licenses anyway) was almost entirely rendered in Arnold, and there's a real step away from the technical limitations of PRMan (down I think mostly to historic architectural choices but in practise a disastorous last few "more buggy than usual" version releases) and towards the shiny-shiny that Mantra, Arnold, Clarisse (sp?!), etc. can offer such as real-world lighting models with low-cost indirect illumination, refraction, sub-surface etc.

    Pixar may not make a lot of money from PRMan but it likes having the authority of the universal default renderer. Additionally any revenue from software sales does help effectively fund the feature department's R&D work.

    1 0
  6. User McUser
    Thumb Up

    Not a Complete Solution

    Before you rush out to download it, remember that RenderMan is just the engine that generates graphics from your input files. You still have to create the scene, characters/objects, textures, and write the scripts that actually animate things which requires a number of other programs (3d modeling programs, photo editing, etc.) which may or may not be free.

    PS: Not saying this is bad, just pointing it out.

    1 0
    1. DesktopGuy
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not a Complete Solution

      As @User McUser pointed out - this is not animation software and actually has no interface.

      It's simply an industry standard rendering pipeline.

      It's used inside maya, Cinema4D etc..

      Never seen it used in any of the free 3d packages.

      0 0
  7. Salts

    Another one...

    which maybe of interest is lightworks http://www.lwks.com/ currently only available for Windows & Linux but a Mac version is on the way, it is a professional video editing software package. It is limited in the free version, but not by much IMHO, which means it works for me.

    0 0
  8. Moiraine

    Interesting...

    Well, they'll have fewer people pirating it. Let's see where they end up taking it.

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like