The Future of Renderman

Earlier this year Pixar announced some big changes to its long time industry work-horse Renderman. Firstly they  have completely restructured their pricing so that the renderer is free for non-commerical use and much more affordable for commercial - Pixar and Disney have stated they are moving towards a more open-source approach to encourage further development of the software. More importantly, some exciting new technology has been integrated into Renderman - which is now one software package, combining what was previously Renderman Studio and Renderman Pro Server. With some of the new advances in the rendering techniques, Renderman looks to catch up with the times and provide some stiff competition for renderers like Arnold, which in recent years have proved stronger and more production friendly than the then existing versions of Renderman. Based on some of the demos I watched on the Pixar site, the new Renderman can handle very large sets of geometry fairly effortlessly, even during interactive re-rendering. It also combines uni-directional and bi-directional path tracing to provide more flexibility for accurately and efficiently handling different lighting situations.

FxGuide covers some of the discussion as it stood back in May -
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-of-next-25-years/

And some more up-to-date information on the technology that will be part of the new Renderman directly from Pixar's site -
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25847

The new platform was originally projected to be released sometime around Siggraph this August, but according to a recent email from one of the Pixar sales managers, it looks like it won't actually be released until later this fall.


One section I found especially exciting in the FxGuide article was where Ed Catmull discusses how five major research centers - Pixar, ILM, Disney Research, Disney Animation, and the Carnegie Mellon Lab - are now all working together cooperatively to research and develop new and improved rendering solutions. And with the extra effort they are putting into the future of Renderman, you can be certain other developers and researchers will take notice, and we could see some exciting developments for other render engines and rendering as a whole.

FxGuide interview with Marcos Fajardo

The creator of Arnold talks about his renderer and the future of Solid Angle -
http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-193-in-depth-with-arnold-creator-marcos-fajardo/

FxGuide also previously did another interview with Marcos back in February -
http://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcasts/fxpodcast-270-solid-angles-marcos-fajardo-on-arnold/