Intro to RenderMan for Blender

https://community.renderman.pixar.com/article/906/introduction-to-prman-for-blender.html

by mariuz • 11 years ago

138 71 11 years ago

community.renderman.pixar.com

imaginenore4• 11 years ago

It gives me no reasons to use it over the standard Cycles renderer.

eggy4• 11 years ago

Not even for all of the available shaders, books, tutorials and other resources made available for it over the years? The analogy I make is a programming language that is so-so, but has a hundred relevant, useful libraries vs. the technically better language with hardly any libraries. Cycles has the basic building blocks to create a library of pre-defined shaders, but Renderman has over 25 years of history, and tons of RSL examples.

imaginenore4• 11 years ago

Show me just one really cool thing that can be done with Renderman and can't be done with Cycles. Show off that 25 years of history.

jetskindo• 11 years ago

I know everyone is excited about this but I would like to see the benefits of using it over cycles.

So far I must say cycles is pretty great

mathnode• 11 years ago

Rendering, is a job in itself. There are people who do nothing but develop looks and write shaders all day everyday, and others who create and manage distributed rendering pipelines.

Cycles is great, but just like Mental Ray, in other applications, it's part of another package. Sure you can run them headless, but why? When there is something that is made for it that is so well documented and has great support solely for that purpose.

Rendering features aside, it's a great business and architecture choice.

imaginenore4• 11 years ago

You realize you didn't name a single benefit over Cycles?

AlphaSite• 11 years ago

I dont know the current situation, but last time i checked cycles was sower relative to the competition and unarguably Renderman is far more battle-tested.

jlarocco2• 11 years ago

That's almost a silly question.

If you Google it for a couple minutes, you'll see why a lot of people would prefer Renderman.

Joeboy• 11 years ago

My experience with Cycles is that it generally looks almost great, except for a bunch of terrible looking fireflies (lone, overly bright pixels) for which there is no straightforward cure.

(I am very grateful for Blender and Cycles in general though).

joeld422• 11 years ago

Cycles is hard to use for animation because it is very noisy, it's fast to get an initial image (great for tweaking) but it's slow to get a noise-free image. Also this includes pixar's "denoising as a post process" which is really amazing (and might even be applicable to cycles renders).

Cycles shading graph is very limited (but well chosen) compared to the flexibility of Renderman Shading Language.

Renderman's subpixel shading is just amazing, so getting crisp, antialiased renders even with fine detail is automatic, whereas cycles might require tweaking the settings or really cranking up the sample rate.

Cycles struggles and has memory limitations on large (even not so large) scenes.

Renderman produces very good motion blur without much performance hit, which is critical for integrating with real-world footage.

Renderman has a lot of features (similar to plugins) to integrate with external tech (e.g. you could plug in a custom hair generator step), which is critical for production.

Renderman has a lot of "scalability" features like caching indirect lighting into brickmaps, or loading large sets of tiled textures, that cycles (or even blender) just don't support.

Also, renderman has been used in production for decades, so a lot of places have built up large libraries of tricks, shaders or tools that work with renderman that they can use.

Renderman is well integrated with many render-farm technologies, so if you're working on a large animation there are some great option. Of course there are ways to do this with Cycles, too, but they are generally less mature and lack some production features.

With all of that said, cycles is still an amazingly powerful renderer, and completely free (not just free to use). You don't have to generate and install a license file to use Cycles, and if you want to tinker with the source code, you can do so! That's not going to happen with renderman anytime soon...

332451b4• 11 years ago

For a fair comparison we should compare PRMan's RIS with Cycles though, not REYES. RIS is what Pixar are focusing on and rendering their movies with now.

Yes, REYES is great at subpixel shading, rendering fast motion blur, using brickmaps with indirect light, and using very little memory for detailed displacement. But with RIS all those things are gone. PRMan's implementation might still be more efficient, I don't know, but with the switch to path tracing they are definitely giving up various advantages that REYES had.

joshuak2• 11 years ago

Cycles is pretty great. RenderMan's value is entirely in it's extremely fine level of control. It's typically used in production settings by RenderMan power users who can write custom shaders, complex interactions with non turn key systems, like custom simulators, and other production workflow tools.

It has been hammered on in many ways by many people for several decades and is focused on stable efficient production. For this reason it can take quite a lot of work to get great images out of it, the configurability and control come at a cost.

I think of light transport simulators as a completely different thing from production renderers. A simulator is like a camera that captures reality, where as production renderers are not bound by reality so they are more like fine art tools (brushes, rulers, etc.).

julius• 11 years ago

Any links to a good comparison of RenderMan vs. Cycles? Performance would be nice to know.

mkesper• 11 years ago

RenderMan is now free for all non-commercial purposes, including evaluations, education, research, and personal projects. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation. For further details please refer to Pixar's Non-Commercial RenderMan FAQ. http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25849

So this is non-free.

VikingCoder• 11 years ago

You can also post renderings / videos you make to sites like YouTube and legally make money off of advertising.

remotebug• 11 years ago

Indeed, that is explicitly permitted. Weird how they consider it indirect. Reading through 11) I thought indirect meant other things.

kelnos• 11 years ago

Free as in beer, at least. I see no problem with that. Good on Pixar for doing some good. Just because they fall short of some sort of arbitrary ideal, it doesn't mean they're bad people or that this licensing method is a useless gesture.

manishsharan• 11 years ago

Can someone please advise me how to get started with this stuff? I have been developing enterprise applications which is boring to all kids, including my nieces and nephews. I wish I could something with Blender etc. to impress those kids. I have found the documentation to be too intimidating for an absolute newbie. I am looking for a dummies guide for rendering. I am not looking to change careers; just want to pursue this to get an understanding and hook those kids into programming.

beering• 11 years ago

There are a gazillion YouTube tutorials for Blender showing you how to make some very cool stuff. Some of the newer tutorials using Blender's Cycles renderer creates photorealistic images without much effort.

Just make sure that you get recent tutorials - there is probably stuff from pre-2.5 Blender floating around that would be confusing to anyone using newer versions.

Buetol• 11 years ago

You can follow the official Blender getting-started guide: https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/

The CG Cookie tutorial especially: https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-basics/

slavik81• 11 years ago

I second the CG Cookie tutorials. Knowing nothing about Blender and little about 3D animation, I started watching tutorials on a Monday afternoon and finished rendering early Thursday morning, though I did little else besides work, attend class and sleep those days.

It should give you an idea of the sort of animation you can expect to achieve in your first week. The only thing I didn't make myself was the wood texture.

https://youtu.be/YrvfTPx4JlM

elektromekatron• 11 years ago

Come up with an idea to work towards. Like making a model of a favourite toy from when you were a kid. Then trawl documentation and tutorials towards doing that.

Then repeat the exercise with something more complicated.

Keep doing this relentlessly and you will get good surprisingly quickly.

themodelplumber• 11 years ago

I recommend checking to see if there's a class available where you live. I used to teach a kids 3D modeling class using Art of Illusion (great beginner 3D app) up in Portland, and I know that there were adult classes for e.g. Maya available as well.

Since you're learning the fundamentals of modeling, lighting, rendering, and animation, it really doesn't matter what software you start with (really, it doesn't). In-person classes are amazing for learning about anti-patterns as you work on your projects. For example, just learning to navigate the various modeling views can be very tricky for beginners--many of my students would start arranging objects in a perspective view, and it was easy to point out the flaws in that approach early and get them back on a better path.

bananaoomarang• 11 years ago

I used to use this site: http://www.blenderguru.com/

solidangle7• 11 years ago

If you're interested in writing a renderer yourself (which is obviously way cooler than using some tools), I'd recommend first picking up either "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics" by Shirley and Marschner or "Computer Graphics: Principles & Practices" by Foley and Van Dam. Once you understand the basics of computer graphics and especially of shading and ray tracing, I'd recommend picking up "Physically Based Rendering: From theory to implementation" by Pharr and Humphreys which is an excellent book that explains the State of the Art of photorealistic rendering. Once you understand how physically based rendering, path tracing, BSDFs and all that good stuff works you're ready to write your own rendering (or to implement a new SIGGRAPH paper in the framework provided by the book). It's a lot of fun writing your own renderer and you'll produce some beautiful pictures.

lelandbatey• 11 years ago

As someone who has dabbled, I have to recommend the "Business Card sized Raytracer"[0]. Learning how it worked, modifying it, trying to make it faster or sharper, display different shapes, etc. may serve to whet one's appetite on the subject.

First thing I recommend is trying to get it to show your name[1] instead of the original authors initials.

[0] http://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/

[1] http://lelandbatey.com/anim07.gif

joeld422• 11 years ago

This series of blog posts from Mike Farnsworth (a rendering fanatic and blender contributer) goes over how to create a "modern" ray tracer from scratch. Highly reccomended:

http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2012/04/basic-ray-tracer-stag...

joshuak2• 11 years ago

I started working with RenderMan in 1988/89. If you're a programmer then I think the RIB interface is even easier then using GUI tools like Blender. It can be very fun to play with directly. Feed the following text into `prman`.

  Display "hacker news" "framebuffer" "rgba"
  Projection "perspective" "fov" [45]
  Translate 0 0 10
  WorldBegin
    Translate 0 -1 0
    Rotate 120 -1 0 0
    Geometry "teapot"
  WorldEnd

Then check out the Steve Upstill book "The Renderman Companion", "Advanced RenderMan" by Tony Apodaca and Larry Gritz, and the spec[1] for reference.

You can learn a lot of creative skills, geometry, animation, math, and technology from this simple interface. Note how rotations are in degrees, and commands are easily human readable. The interface was designed to be useable by people as easily as by software ("WorldBegin", cute and intuitive). Key things to remember when playing around with the RIB interface:

It's a 'right handed' coordinate system, so use your right hand to model the axis (perpendicular index finder, thumb, and middle finder form the axis). Put your thumb along the positive axis to visualize things like rotation. Above I use a negative 1 x axis (vector) to rotate 120 degrees so I can visualize the direction of rotation by pointing my right thumb to the right (negative x axis), and the direction my fingers curl is the direction of rotation.

The transformation hierarchy makes it easy to control and reason about transformations without resorting to matrix math. Use that to create easy to manipulate groups. The relevant commands are:

  # parent object
  TransformBegin
    Translate x y z
    Rotate angle x_axis y_axis z_axis
    Scale x y z
    Skew angle dx1 dy1 dz1 dx2 dy2 dz2
    # child object
    TransformBegin
      # Translate x y z...
      # ... invoke geometry
    TransformEnd
  TransformEnd

1: http://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/rispec_pdf/RISpec...

deepaksurti• 11 years ago

I have also been working my way through learning Blender. 2 years back, when I was writing a 3D game, I learnt Blender in the context of importing models, setting textures, material, exporting to the quake .md5 format.

Blender has a steep learning curve. Along the way I learnt some very basic modeling to build objects joining default shapes like Lego!!! That was Round 1 of learning and that gave me an insight into what I needed. I enjoyed it enough to want to learn further, with a 'different' full time day job.

Now, I am working my way through cg-masters video tutorials (warning: these are $$ not free), but worth the money. The order in which I work through these are: 1. Master It. Vol 1 & 2 fundamentals. 2. Character Creation Vol 1, 2, 3. 3. Environment Modeling & Texturing OR Environment & Animation All of the above at: http://www.cgmasters.net/training-dvds/

For character animation much recommended (again $$): 1. Animation Fundamentals from https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-animation-fundamentals/, I have the DVD of this, now it is only online I think.

Books I have referred to: 1. The first book I worked my way through: Blender Foundations (Roland Heiss) : http://www.amazon.com/Blender-Foundations-Essential-Guide-Le... 2. Browsed through: Beginning Blender and Tradigital Blender.

Now I would recommend: Blender MasterClass from NoStarch. I would recommend purchasing a paper copy of this book.

I have also been making notes of what I am learning through the cg-masters videos: https://bitbucket.org/dmsurti/learn-blender, snail like progress here, and no progress since Mar this year.

This was about books and videos. Don't forget the hardware. PLEASE buy a keyboard with a num-pad, I have the Logitech Solar which has this as also a great 3 button mouse, the Logitech Anywhere Mx. I have worked without this setup and it is a pain to work without these, in Blender.

This has been the way it has worked out for me. I hope it helps you figure your way out. It is a hard grind, but totally worth it, especially to keep the right brain happy and not starving, as we mostly do. And just like you I am doing this only for fun and not to change careers. Just trying to do the only right brain activity well.

JedTheKrampus• 11 years ago

On the topic of hardware, I've been rocking the tenkeyless keyboards for quite a while now and they work better than you might think with Blender. With a simple pie menu for changing views bound to the q key the numpad is pretty extraneous. If you want a good set of pie menus that's premade and ready to roll, Wazou's are pretty good. https://github.com/pitiwazou/Scripts-Blender

I do agree that a 3-button mouse is super necessary, though a Wacom or equivalent tablet is a better bet in the long run (much better for sculpting, concepts and texturing) and less likely to wreck your fingers.

yarrel• 11 years ago

Blender is winning.

Intro to RenderMan for Blender

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