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April 08, 2005
Renderman for Maya
I attended the unveiling of Pixar's Renderman for Maya product at the Gnomon school in Hollywood last night. The event was well-attended and the presentation took place in a sound stage large enogh to accomodate a large screen video projection system which showed the software to good effect.
Maya users looking for a sophisticated alternative to the native Maya renderer have been able to use Mental Ray for some time now, and at no additional cost. The Renderman route was until now a relatively expensive and somewhat more difficult one.
Before the advent of Renderman for Maya, the "friendliest" front-end for Renderman within a Maya context, to my knowledge, was the SLIM plugin. The basic workflow for SLIM users entailed leaving the Maya renderer as soon as possible, and using SLIM-based shaders and mapping coordinate systems developed not within the Maya hypershade, but within a node-based environment known as a SLIM palette.
Maya for Renderman obviates the need for this additional shader design environment. Maya users will now build Renderman shaders within the Maya hypershade. The "feeling" of using Renderman for Maya appears to be similar to that of using Mental Ray. The familiar Maya interface remains largely the same, with the addition of new Renderman-specific tabs and attributes.
Renderman has many well-known strengths. It looks great, and (having been forged in the fires of Pixar's hardcore production demands) can handle complex displacements and extensive camera and object motion blur without suffering a big performance hit. Renderman executes all of its particle rendering within software, which allows the user to do more sophisticated, shader-driven control than does some of Maya's (hardware-rendered) particles. Renderman's "Deep Shadows" technique gives the Maya user access to beautifully rendered shadows from particles, fur, and hair.
This is a tempting plug-in with some small drawbacks:
Unlike Mental Ray, Renderman for Maya costs an additional $995/seat.
While Renderman does have a subsurface scattering algorithm, and an occlusion shader, it does not seem, on the whole, to place as much emphasis on Global Illumination techniques as does Mental Ray.
Renderman for Maya is designed to put the production-proven power of Renderman into the hands of the small to medium PC- and Mac-based CG houses. Pixar has no immediate support for a Linux version.
Posted by digital artform at April 8, 2005 11:39 AM
Comments
Hi,
I am very sad that Pixar doesn't support for Linux User. i am use Maya for linux, and everyday I always waiting the renderman plugins for maya that run on Linux. but right now, i am dispointed.
Regards,
Teddy Widhi L.
Penguin Power
Posted by: Teddy at April 14, 2005 08:11 PM
Did they say anything about the number of CPUs RenderMan for Maya will work on?
In a pre-release statement I read that it is licensed only for ONE CPU. I.e. if you have a dual CPU machine RenderMan for Maya will ignore the second CPU and render 'half-speed' as compared to Maya Software or Mental Ray. Apparently you need to purchase a second $995 license to have it run on both CPUs.
That is especially an issue with the advent of dual-core CPUs where we will soon have dual dual-core CPU machines. Mental Ray will run on all 4 cores, while RenderMan for Maya will only run on one... I would consider that a major draw-back if true.
Posted by: Andreas C. Bauer at April 16, 2005 07:36 AM
I couldn't say for sure, but what you say has a ring of familiarity to it.
Posted by: Joseph Francis at April 16, 2005 08:06 AM
[quote]
Before the advent of Renderman for Maya, the "friendliest" front-end for Renderman within a Maya context, to my knowledge, was the SLIM plugin.
.....snip snip snip .....
largely the same, with the addition of new Renderman-specific tabs and attributes.
[quote]
This was allready possible using Mayaman, a plugin for maya developed by Animal Logic.
Of course you still need to use a renderman compliant render (Renderman Pro Server,Air,3Delight) but as interface i consider Mayaman way simpler then Slim.
Xavier
Posted by: xavier at April 17, 2005 10:35 PM
There are so many extraordinary visual posibilities in rendering, without the need of subsurface scattering, occlusion, Global Illumination, etc. While ray tracing does help the amateur in getting a cute picture very easy, without the need for understanding lighting & shading & rendering, a creative PRMan user can do so much more without ray tracing effects, and PRMan doesn't need stuff like GI to give you fantastic imagery.
Actually, the flexibility and power of Renderman is so very succesfully defying ray tracing techniques. Why would someone trade power & flexibility for comodity/simplicity? I know why... but I won't tell you (ha ha, actually I told you already).
Posted by: Virgil Mihailescu at April 18, 2005 09:30 PM
because it is from simplicity that u get power and flexibility.
don't misuse the term, simple things can be highly complex given that u iterate them enough to become complex.
the word commodity has absolutely nothing to do with simplicity
mark my words, things can be very very daunting and annoying if they are complicated
in my view, power and flexibility must come packed in a box of simplicity , if not, they are useless (or very close to that).
Posted by: Ureche Octavian at April 19, 2005 08:04 AM
I can create complex effects in Mental Ray without ray tracing. I was very dissappointed with Renderman for Maya. All the effects that I tried in Renderman (Occlusion, Image based lighting, indirect lighting) all of them were slow and the quality was not as high as Mental Ray's. Mental Ray also gave me good render times (like 14 seconds to calculate FG in a normal scene) while Renderman took 50 seconds to calculate the same scene with its own materials and I still got artefacts. If you don't believe me, try for yourself.
No doubt renderman is a powerful rendering system (and more powerful than mental ray in production level tasks) but for a small group like us or a normal user, renderman is probably the worst choice. I will be waiting for V-Ray for maya which will definitely beat renderman and mental ray
Posted by: Samaursa at December 15, 2005 09:56 AM
Renderman for maya is a good render but i still use renderman pro server with rat. I hope Renderman for maya will in future support caustic and global illumination [Photons]the version 1.0 and 1.1 doesnt support that =[
Posted by: loni at January 29, 2006 06:04 AM
I want to learn more about renderman
please mail for me
Posted by: hasan at July 30, 2006 06:40 AM