There are too many mature renderers and the competition is intense.<p>The current popular actively developed ones are: V-Ray (which we use in <a href="http://Clara.io" rel="nofollow">http://Clara.io</a>), Arnold, Maxwell, Pixar's RenderMan, and KeyShot.<p>Less popular but actively developed ones are: RedShift, Furry Ball, 3Delight, NVIDIA iRay, Octane/Bridge...<p>And then the ones that are integrated into the 3D packages themselves like Blender's Cycles, Modo's renderer, Cinema 4D's renderer, Houdini's Mantra, Mental Images (included in most Autodesk products.)<p>Then the smaller opensource ones: Sunflow, Lux, Corona, Mitsuba, Pixie...<p>That is a lot of renderers and I am sure that I am missing quite a few.
It's not mentioned in the text of the post itself, but the $495 price represents a 75% discount on the previous price. A far more detailed overview is here for those interested: <a href="http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-of-next-25-years/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-o...</a>
I feel like the main takeaway is that they recognized non-commercial use of this crazy expensive software to be legitimate. I think this covers 80% of the use cases where people turn to piracy instead. Good on Pixar. Lets see if Adobe follows suit sometime soon. I know some design students who don't buy a lot of textbooks but have a hole in their pocket from Creative Suite.
So, now that RenderMan is free for non-commercial use, what do people consider to be the contenders for best-in-class free software for modeling, animating, lighting, etc?<p>If you wanted to set up an all-free environment to learn, what's the list of software you would use?
When (if at all) will it be feasible for a bunch of kids in a garage to make a feature-length realistic-cgi movie? Assume computing on the public cloud, movie budget $1M.
There's also RenderMan On Demand, which seemed like an interesting but odd fit:<p><a href="https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/</a><p>Maybe useful if you hit crunch mode, I guess.
OT: So I was in Marin County in 1991, all excited after my interview with Pixar. Drove my rented car back to the airport and hopped on the shuttle to the main terminal. Sat in my seat just as another guy struggled to get a box I recognized as a small computer onto the shuttle. He looked at me and I got up to help him but he had someone he was with who showed up and they lifted the box together.<p>The first guy was Ed Catmull in the video. I recognized him but didn't know what to say and he got into some deep discussion with the guy he was with.<p>I got a job offer from Pixar but turned them down cause my first child was just born and, at the time, I was concerned about Pixar's stability which turned out to be a correct belief back then. Instead, I accepted an offer from Silicon Graphics and sat next to Jim Clark in the lunch room as much as I could.