RenderMan price restructuring

How does this work for max users?

this is like a news item about FREE BEER ON THE MOON, pointless as only maya has a renderman plugin, remember maxman and blue moon render tools?…complete nightmare trying to connect 3dsmax to a renderman type renderer…move on..Vray or Octane is the future not renderman.

@cresshead 100% right. I have a few friend’s that are lighters that use Max/Maya. All of them have expressed how there is this mantra of “RenderMan is God.” – without them even having experience with Vray.

It kind of reminds me of maybe a Flame artist back in the day criticizing Nuke. It makes sense to have Pixar make it free for non-commercial work to build a user base, but from an outsider it looks to me that RM is not the most artist-friendly.

Also, when you read about RenderMan, they always talk about the companies that use it and they are in a position to do R&D (Pixar, ILM…etc.). Vray is popular because it is fantastic and relatively easy to jump into. I mean, do a search for “Vray Glass/Chrome”; Very popular for new users to search. Then do the same for RenderMan; you are welcomed with programming and physics charts. Not that it’s bad to know and understand how the physics of light work. But from the perspective of someone that is new, it’s overwhelming.

Just my 2 cents.

It just bewilders me that they don’t make it available for one of the (the?) largest user bases on the market, even if they think the scenarios in which Max is used isn’t exactly aligned with what they expect RM to be used for(animations?), it can still be a great investment for them to get access to a large portion of the market that they don’t currently have access to, this means they can have their tool in the hands of potentially hundreds of thousands of more people which would in the long run be much more beneficial to them. to me their reasoning and mentality is just odd, it’s as if some entity just doesn’t want that to happen.

After all, 10 years ago before maya was acquired by adesk they were thinking about a Max version, so what happened? I’m sure both Max’s userbase and it’s use case in the vfx industry have increased from then.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a very happy VRay user and now with Moskito in the horizon, I’m not that preoccupied with thoughts of another renderer, but again this whole RM or arnold situation never made much sense to me.

@no1nja, What you are obviously missing/misinterpreting is that what you are concluding by yourself isn’t said/suggested anywhere (or at least nowhere I can find.)

The fact that one particular software isn’t supported by another can have many different reasons.

The same goes for the support of cinema4d, that doesn’t necessarily mean that cinema4d is a major player in the film industry, it may simply be though to maxon(as opposed to autodesk) having pushed very hard to get a support for it, that’s it.

The most exciting part of this news is their pricing structure. That is what Max users should be looking at here. We all know that Renderman coming to Max is a pipe-dream, but what this will do is drive Maya and C4D users to choose Renderman over Arnold/Vray (albeit C4D users have less choice). This in turn will put pressure on Chaos and Arnold to be more aggressive with their pricing. THIS is why this is good news for Max artists facing the cost of a Vray 3.0 upgrade. So, now we wait.

So I contacted Pixar about this matter and here is the respond I received from them, I thought I let everyone know, thanks to Chris Ford for his kind reply:

“Hello,

We greatly appreciate your email. We have actually considered a 3ds max->RenderMan translator several times in the past, but the demand when we came to do the business analysis was actually quite low. Part of the reason appears to have been the number of renderers for 3ds max already available, and our primarily film-centric development focus being slightly divergent to the main focus of users of 3ds max at the time. This was a matter of some regret as I was a product manager formally responsible for 3ds max for some years.

However since our major announcements as of last Thursday 05/29 that opportunity may have changed. I don’t have an immediate answer at this point, but I would not rule out something happening either from us or through a third party in future. We are certainly very aware of the 3ds max footprint.

Best regards

Chris Ford

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Chris Ford
Business Director – RenderMan
Pixar Animation Studios
——————————————“

I think it’s simply too late. There are so many developments outperforming Renderman. Some people stick to their misjudgements about 3ds Max, it’s users and their needs til they are completely outdated.