On Renderman... I did something I've never done...
wancow
Posts: 2,708
I actually went to the Renderman website! Never done that before. I was quite surprised to find out that Renderman does not cost $14,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 but more like $2,000.00 for a single user liscense...
It got me to thinking, is there anyone around here who has actually used Renderman? I'm thinking there very well might be, though the chances are small... I don't think I've ever seen a Renderman render posted on CGTalk even... I've seen Brazil, V-Ray, Lux, Octane and a few others, but never, that I can recall, any Renderman renderings from a private CG Artist...
http://renderman.pixar.com/
If Renderman is the gold standard for render engines... why aren't more people using it?
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I think the Renderman Interface Specification is the standard, not necessarily Pixar's Renderman Renderer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RenderMan_Interface_Specification
By "Gold Standard" I mean that it's used in motion picture production, (I THINK) more often than any other render engine.
They are, but it is so ubiquitous that no one bothers to say otherwise. Just as carpenters don't brag about their hammer's manufacturer, neither do professional animators.
3Delight is renderman, and is used in LOTS of feature films, including Harry Potter, Marvel Pictures, and others. There is a partial list on the 3Delight website. This is the SAME 3Delight that DazStudio users have access to.
So you could say that A LOT of people use Renderman, and they don't know it. :-)
Kendall
Renderman compliant is NOT Renderman the render engine. Renderman Compliant refers to the shader language, not the render engine itself.
Renderman is a standard reference. There is no "Renderman" product. Pixar's product is PrRenderman, or PhotoRealisticRenderman. NOT Renderman. So 3Delight is as much "Renderman" as is PrRenderman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renderman
Kendall
And they never put a big fat (R) behind RenderMan because it is NOT a Registered Trademark of Pixar (registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office)
and it does NOT say at the bottom of this page:
http://renderman.pixar.com/products/news/rms3.0_announce.html
That Renderman is a Pixar Trademark...
Oh, they tried. However, it was ruled that the term had become too generic to be allowed to be trademarked.
The term RiSpec was coined to try to separate the standard from the Pixar use of "Renderman" to denote their product... RiSpec just never caught on.
So, confusion still reigns with those not familiar with the situation.
Kendall
They might also update their bio:
Their latest release is Brave (on DVD), and another one monsters academy coming soon.
Erm about the ®:
if they not registered this as a trademark, how do you explain this? see attachment
Looks like a ®egistered trademark to me..
(if you look at the renderman page it's also in the page title.
Their latest release is Brave (on DVD), and another one monsters academy coming soon.
Erm about the ®:
if they not registered this as a trademark, how do you explain this? see attachment
Looks like a ®egistered trademark to me..
(if you look at the renderman page it's also in the page title.
The ownership of a trademark does not mean that there is a "product" with that name. Please, at least, read the material.
Renderman was trademarked and challenged. See the wikipedia article cited. Trademark retention REQUIRES enforcement or the loss of the ability to enforce will ensue. This is what happened. Pixar is the "owner" of a piece of paper, the ability to enforce the trademark was lost. They still "own" the trademark, but have no way to stop others from using it. Anyone who can show RiSpec compliance can call themselves "Renderman" and many have and do.
Kendall
From: http://renderman.pixar.com/view/renderman-prman-the-rispec-and-renderman-studio
RenderMan and the RiSpec
RenderMan has been around since the early 1980s. A RenderMan renderer, or RenderMan in general, technically refers to a renderer that is compliant with the open source scene description language developed and made public by Pixar in a document called the RenderMan Interface Specification (RiSpec). This document lays the groundwork for, among other things, a shading language interface to a RenderMan renderer (SL) and the scene description language called RenderMan Interface Bytestream (RIB). Any renderer that implements the RiSpec can call itself a RenderMan renderer. And, yes, there are a number of RenderMan-compliant renderers out there, some more fully-featured than others, but none compare to the granddaddy of them all, the don, the overlord, the one and only... Pixar's PRMan.
--- END EXCERPT ---
Is this clear enough?
Kendall
I think you do need some glases:
On the bottom of the page you mensioned has the following line (top of the trademark notes):
There is so much confusion over this issue. It really is hard to find an "acceptable" and "credible" source that will state things clearly. So many people now doubt Wikipedia.
Pixar has clouded the issue so much over the years, and Disney has made the situation worse recently. I wouldn't put it past Disney to try to enforce the lost trademark by intimidation.
Kendall
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/renderman-studio
I do remember the whole thing with BMRT etc... fine.
I was referring to the Renderman Render Engine that is produced by Pixar which is used to render 100% of filmes produced by Pixar Animation Studios...
Apparently you can also render "in the cloud"
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/renderman-on-demand
And all I was asking is: Does anyone actually use RenderMan? THE RenderMan.
The purpose of my question had to do with how difficult it would be to use. Is it similar to the way BMRT worked in that everything had to be scripted?
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-art-of-rendering/
"Photorealistic RenderMan, PRMan, is Pixar’s primary renderer and one of the most influential and respected renderers in the world. Not only has every major Pixar film and thus many Academy Award winning animated feature films used it, is also the blue ribbon high end package that all other renderers must be compared to."
And from your own excerpt: "but none compare to the granddaddy of them all, the don, the overlord, the one and only… Pixar’s PRMan."
I had a license for PRMan for a period. It was not fast, and required a farm to do anything beyond test renders. 3Delight was significantly faster and better for many things. If you scan the "professional" areas you will see that 3DL and PRMan split the market pretty evenly. PRMan is, obviously, used internally at Disney/Pixar while 3DL is used in many other places.
Now, keep in mind that that link I used was FROM Pixar, and they would consider their own product the "best." :-) EDIT: I thought it best to use Pixar's own words to show that there is no "RenderMan" product and that any RiSpec Renderer can claim the name "RenderMan.
The two products alternate between who is considered "better" depending on the current releases. Right now, PRMan has a leg up in that Disney/Pixar has added some support for GPU offloading, while DNAresearch has not. The current "renderman", or RiSpec, is not friendly toward GPU splitting, yet. RISpec usually requires more instructions than GPU's normally provide. There is work being done to change this, but it is going slowly.
Kendall
Ack! Meant to edit... see prev post.
I saw that Weta and Nvidia had to add a GPU solution for the production of Avatar to augment their RenderMan renders...
http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-features/45279-nvidia-unveils-pantaray-engine
I had heard that RenderMan was slow. I also heard that it was not a ray trace engine till a late version of the software (though this may have been an error, based on what' I"ve been reading). That said, people put up with Lux Renders that take days to produce...
I have the main 3Delight engine... it's just a matter of me learning how to use it...
You have the full 12 3Delight horses under the bonnet but for reasons hitherto unknown Daz disabled or just didn't add access to all those functions. I suspect it might be partly to create a market opportunity for add-on developers like omnifreaker. I mean, we wouldn't buy Uber products if all those setting were already exposed natively inside DS. And if I understand it right, he didn't add anything that wasn't already there. He just made it possible to use what was there.
Harry, my guess is that because DS is basically freeware, that had a lot to do with disabling however many of the features... but as I said, that's a guess.
I dunno. You'd think it was costing them the same amount of money in licensing fees whether or not all functionality was enabled. From a let's safe money on development cost and skip a lot of high end stuff I guess it makes sense.
Basically, it boils down to what is provided by DNA in their dll/dylib.
DAZ accesses 3DL via the API provided in the shared libraries. Many of the limitations will be there, not in DS or in 3DL.
Besides, if DAZ did everything, where would that leave people like me and Alessandro?
Kendall
In truth the 3DeLight version of RenderMan is one, two or three versions behind the full version of Renderman. I'm not sure which it is but it is always behind some. The reason that is done is because DS does not have the features that would call the newest advanced feartures of the full version. That does leave the door open for the third party developers to create plugins that do call the features that DS does not have built in. I think its one way they keep the cost of DS down when it was a Pay Program.
There is a difference between "disabling" and not enabling. the basic DAZ Studio shaders were written a long time ago, people who have been here longer than I could tell you better, but wasn't about seven or eight years ago? Contemporary with maybe Poser 5?
Gneiss, that makes sense. The only time I use DS Shaders is when I have to tile a texture. For some odd reason I can't get that to work with UberSurfaceses... (and when I do that, I'll usually bake that shader and go back to UberSurface)
Tiling works fine with Ubershader it just doesn't show in preview.
There are many things that 3DL provides that don't show in the preview. This is the case with "other" more expensive software as well.
Kendall
Well I'll be damned... it does work! Thanks for that tip! Why wouldn't it show in preview with ubersurface while it does with DS Default Shader?
Well I'll be damned... it does work! Thanks for that tip! Why wouldn't it show in preview with ubersurface while it does with DS Default Shader?
Possibly, there is special code in DS to detect the use of the default shader and replicate the results. For a renderman based shader, it would require firing up the SDL/TDL compilers to generate the shader, and textures and then starting the full 3DL to interpret the actual code... I believe this is called "Spot Rendering" in the interface :-)
Kendall
Actually, with the latest beta, it's just a few point releases behind.
All through the 4.x cycle it's been 'major version' on par with 3DL.
As to what is/isn't 'exposed'...since at least DS3, if you wanted you could with some hardwork, trial and error and fair measure of luck get at what wasn't obviously available. Some things were easier than others. With DS 4.x a lot more is more easily accessible...but the big thing is, for the most part DS is only using a fraction of the power of 3DL, even with incorporating some of the more advanced features.
Other apps that use 3DL have had things like 'Shave and a haircut' for years now...DS is just getting around to leveraging those features, by way of plugins, not something DAZ has done. The fact is, if you look at some of the basic philosophy of DAZ, it's always been about providing the basics, a dev kit and encouraging the 'community' to add in the features that are wanted.