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burlesona

I don’t get it. This is a product page for a well known product. What’s noteworthy here?

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I had no idea that renderman is for sale.

I thought renderman was Pixar’s in-house magic juice - the tech that puts them apart kinda thing.

How can rendering put a company apart if rendering in just about any tool is already so close to physical reality?

In the industry, studios will have different tech stacks that make them competitive for different areas. Some will have specialized simulations software for fluid dynamics, others really advanced rigging techniques that allow super realistic results faster than competing studios. A lot of it comes down to custom pipelines and integrations depending on their needs.

The off-the-shelf tools have come a long way for a lot of tasks, but studios still create really awesome in house software that in a bidding situation (VFX) can help a bit. Though to be frank the bidding process is an absolute mess.

When it comes to rendering, it all depends on the focus of the projects and the direction/needs of the studios. Though the end results may be similar, the way you get there will have varying degrees of optimization and flexibility depending what the stack is built on (besides the typical necessities of traced rendering).

Some examples:

- Pixar: Renderman

- Weta Digital: Manuka [0]

- Framestore: Freak [1]

[0] https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/manuka...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210126083056/https://beforesan...

The devil is really in the details. Pixar and Disney throw scenes at Renderman for overnight rendering jobs where each node loads up to terabytes of data per frame (geometry, textures, volumes...). So the renderer contains tons of tricky optimizations under the hood to support that crazy amount of data. Other renderers like Cycles use pretty much comparable physical models for everything and create almost identical output for simple scenes. But most of them would crash and burn spectacularly of they had to deal with scenes at the size these studios produce.

[Even though you could theoretically generate a lot of detail, especially textures, algorithmically on the fly, nobody goes for that: the only known good way to band limit textures for level of detail reduction without aliasing artifacts is to sample and filter them - generating the whole texture anyway.]

IIRC, PRMan has been for sale since late 1980s. ILM used it for some special effects in The Abyss in 1989 when Pixar had already been spun off.

Renderman as a Pixar product actually predates Pixar as a movie company.

I actually knew that, but somehow thought they took it off the market when they pivot into movies.

So I guess I expected last copy to be sold around Toy Story 1.

People forget that Pixar is a 3D rendering technology company first and only secondly a film studio. When most people out there hear Pixar, they think Toy Story and Finding Nemo, not even knowing about the technology they developed that makes those movies possible.

Indeed. Ed Catmull (Pixar co-founder) is a pioneer in the 3D/CG space.

https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/01/leading-the-way-celebratin...

Maybe it isn't as well-known as we thought and this is the first time people heard of it.

That’s certainly possible. But if folks on this site don’t know how ToyStory or JurassicPark were rendered back in the day, let alone like almost every movie with CG in it since, that would be a little surprising. But maybe?

Well, I didn't know until now.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I never knew Renderman is usable outside of Pixar. It even says free for non-commercial use which is pretty cool.

Training & tutorials for Pixar products used to be notoriously difficult (and expensive) to find, unless you worked at a studio that was paying millions for a site license of prman and engineers to integrate it with your studio pipeline.

It appears that Pixar is becoming a little more friendly to solo end users now that there are more rendering choices out there.

I was under the impression that Renderman was just an internal tool. I didn’t realize they sold it.

I was curious, so checked the Wayback machine. The renderman.pixar.com site has existed since 2005, offering it for sale. I don't know if it was for sale prior to the domain existing: https://web.archive.org/web/20050509112303/https://renderman...

It’s been on sale for as long as Pixar has existed. Toy Story was sold to Jobs as a showcase for selling more Renderman instances.

Exactly this. The critically acclaimed and profitable films are in a sense just adverts for the tool. They're proof that you could not only have an Oscar-winning movie that used this tool for effects, you can make the entire movie with this tool.

See also: Disneyland. People really like Disneyland, and it's profitable for Disney, but it's also one enormous advertisement for their products.

Since Disney and Pixar merged their focus has been on making film franchises and the surrounding merchandise. So it's understandable that most people don't know that wasn't always their focus. When Jobs took over Pixar, he thought they were making a competitor to SGI. They had ambitions to sell not just Renderman licenses, but Renderman hardware. Jobs really wanted them to be a hardware company. They probably saw themselves as occupying the role NVIDIA fills today.

The feature film animation studio was sold to Jobs as a way to market their technology, in order to sell more licenses and create the market which would want their (still theoretical) dedicated GPU hardware.

Turns out the better play was making an animation studio that would rival and then eventually demolish and replace (via merger and integration) the iconic hand-drawn Disney animation.

I suspect the heads of the animation studio within Pixar knew what they were doing though.

I remember it in the late nineties it being selectable, probably with a separate license, into softimage running on sgi workstations.

They do. It actually came with NeXTSTEP too.

Renderman has been used by pretty much every VFX studio for the last 30 years [1]. I remember downloading and dabbling with it along with BMRT [2] in the early 2000s. It was the first widely used tool to have a procedural first approach to rendering.

[1] https://renderman.pixar.com/movies

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Rendering_Tools

I don't think that there is anything to get. It was probably a semi-random submit and the hivemind was in the mood to click on it.

maybe to let ppl know it still exists lol

That may be it. Renderman is of historical interest because it introduced shaders to the industry.[1] That's where the look of Pixar's early work comes from. Everybody else texture-mapped photos of the real world, or 2D paintings, while Pixar was generating infinitely fine detail with shader programs. This allowed the camera to get close to objects without the textures going blurry or blocky.

Today, shaders run in GPUs, and everybody does this, but in a different way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering

The TMS34010 was also quite relevant in what concerns shaders.

Just guessing, but perhaps because this page is supposed to be visible only on their intranet?

Well, they have hobbyist licensing information on this site and pricing, so it’s for public access.

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