View Full Version : Prman 11 shipping!
beaker 11-20-2002, 06:15 PM http://www.digitalproducer.com/2002/11_nov/news/11_18/pixar20.htm
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Array
11-20-2002, 06:38 PM
nice! ive been waiting for this :bounce:
here's the oficial link on pixar's website:
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/news/prman11_release.html
Leonard
11-20-2002, 09:44 PM
Guys, we interviewed Dana Batali of Pixar about the new enhancements in PRMan 11 here:
http://www.3dfestival.com/story.php?story_id=96
Leo
TRi-14
11-20-2002, 11:00 PM
this is outstanding news!!!
Xilica
11-20-2002, 11:41 PM
excellent. >=) :buttrock:
facial
11-21-2002, 01:44 AM
:thumbsup:
timsvw
11-21-2002, 02:04 AM
Who here has used renderman before and what makes it so good. Does it really produce a better quality render than lets say lightwave or maya or can you get just as good of a render out of lightwave and mayas renderer?
-tim
Array
11-21-2002, 02:11 AM
im going to leave tim's question to Beaker....
Anyhow.... too bad the price is still out of this world :thumbsdow maybe they should have a watered down educational version?
/me grumbles something about exluna :annoyed:
Artifex
11-21-2002, 05:03 AM
Well one thing's for shure and it's that renderers like renderman have more realistic feature that most built-in renderers do.
For example renderman permits displacement by the pixel. So it doesnt look at the geometry you have on your model to use as defenition for the displacement, it looks at the mapping you are using to displace alone. It also offers the possibility to have a shadow from bumped surfaces. Its alot more soft and adds more dept to everything. And alot more...
see ya...
beaker
11-21-2002, 05:12 AM
>>Anyhow.... too bad the price is still out of this world
I do agree with you that it would be nice if Prman came down in price. But, you have to remember that PRman is 3-5x faster than most other renderers(scanline), and 10x+ faster once you add displacement or MB. If I can render 3x faster than lets say MR, then it is still cheaper than paying $2500 for MR because I am going to get the same job done in 1/3rd the time. Time is money.
>>maybe they should have a watered down educational version?
Pixar has always had an edu version/pricing:
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/pricelists/educational.html
>>Who here has used renderman before and what makes it so good
1. Speed
2. Speed (displacement and motion blur have very little effect on render times in Prman. Any other renderer will 5-10x the render times with these features turned on)
3. Shading Language without having to resort to an api and writing stuff in C/C++.
4. It can handle enourmous data sets and not even flinch.
5. micropolygons (all higher order surface(nurbs/subd's/etc..) are tesselated down to 1 polygon per pixel, so you get perfectly smooth surfaces.
>>Does it really produce a better quality render than lets say lightwave or maya or can you get just as good of a render out of lightwave and mayas renderer?
Not necessarily, alot of this has to do with the artist behind the tool. I've seen amazing work come out of PovRay.
BrandonD
11-21-2002, 05:35 AM
Originally posted by Artifex
For example renderman permits displacement by the pixel. So it doesnt look at the geometry you have on your model to use as defenition for the displacement, it looks at the mapping you are using to displace alone. It also offers the possibility to have a shadow from bumped surfaces. Its alot more soft and adds more dept to everything. And alot more...
Yes and no, it's not really that simple. The advantage of displacement in PRman comes from the REYES architecture, a pure scanline algorithm that pay attention to only what the camera can see (Render Everything You Ever Saw), then slices and dices all of the geometry into sub-pixel sized patches called MicroPolygons. These can be easily displaced prior to the shading stage to give you very detailed (and fast) displacement. A similar advantage comes in handy with Motion Blur as it stocastically samples the micropolys over time (ugh..pixar patent).
As with everything that is out of balance, "for every advantage comes equal disadvantage." In this case the REYES algorithm doesn't support raytracing (not even raytraced shadows). So to implement raytracing and all of the optical simulation-based advantages that come with it, you've got to use a ray sever. BMRT was popular for this prior to it being removed from the market (the hybrid combo was affectionately called "FrankenRender"). PRman 11 seems to have a new Pixar developer ray server to handle it now.
PS. bump-map shadows aren't totally unique (Brazil R/S has 'em). Deep Shadow maps on the other hand, that's cool!
raffael3d
11-21-2002, 11:42 AM
I think that mental ray is a very good renderer and if it is integrated into a package like it is in XSI this means a lot, since it makes working much easier and faster. I doubt that renderman is 3 times faster.
timsvw
11-21-2002, 01:00 PM
so if I am understanding it clearly. It just renders faster and has better displacement but it is missing raytracing. Are there any benchmark facts out there to how much faster it really is compared to other renderes. To me that seems like a whole lot of money for better displacement and to be faster.
Tim
Array
11-21-2002, 01:10 PM
Originally posted by timsvw
so if I am understanding it clearly. It just renders faster and has better displacement but it is missing raytracing. Are there any benchmark facts out there to how much faster it really is compared to other renderes. To me that seems like a whole lot of money for better displacement and to be faster.
Tim
There is raytracing in PRMan11. Speed is also very important in the production pipeline. Lets say you are rendering 100,000 frames, and PRMan enables you to render each frame 10 seconds faster than if you did it with another renderer. That saves you 1 million seconds, which is about 277 hours. Is it worth it to you in that case?
wedge
11-21-2002, 01:29 PM
I'm sure no one here has yet used PRMan11. I was thinking, though... Did anyone use GI in Entropy? It was beautiful, as Im sure PRMan11 would be. Entropy was also Renderman based, so it had great displacement and quick frame turnarounds. However, since it didn't use any tricks, like Monte Carlo or Photon Mapping, using GI and Radiance in Entropy made frames take 10 or 15 times the time it took without these effects. Will PRMan11 be the fastest radiance renderer we've ever seen? Or will it be the same old speedy PRman, except with the option to render sloooooowly with radiance?
Array
11-21-2002, 01:32 PM
Entropy actually used path tracing to compute GI. Why they chose that method is completely beyond my comprehension, as it is ungodly slow and noisy when compared to photon mapping. :thumbsdow
Besides that, entropy was an amazing piece of software
/me grumbles something about Steve Jobbs
MCronin
11-21-2002, 01:58 PM
Originally posted by wgeddes
Will PRMan11 be the fastest radiance renderer we've ever seen? Or will it be the same old speedy PRman, except with the option to render sloooooowly with radiance?
The word is it's super fast. Pixar says raytracing creates almost no performance hit, so GI is probably pretty fast as well. Of course most people won't be able to tell through simple benchmarking, because PRMan is designed to be a production renderer. It can render 10's of millions of polygons as easily as it can 50,000. I trust it will be the fastest simply because Pixar actually designs for, and uses their renderer in production. They are able to test the software themselves on the most lavish CG productions created year after year. I don't think they'd release something that was too slow to be used in production.
Check out the PRMan 11 testimonials here:
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/whatsrenderman/testimonials.html
wedge
11-21-2002, 02:49 PM
wow. This is reassuring news! ...now... where did I put that $8000...
timsvw
11-21-2002, 03:07 PM
can you set up a render farm with one copy of renderman or do you need to buy a licence for each node?
beaker
11-21-2002, 04:21 PM
>>can you set up a render farm with one copy of renderman or do you need to buy a licence for each node?
Commercial version of Prman is 5k per processor.(8k version is with the artist tools for connecting to maya and render management)
BrandonD
11-21-2002, 04:24 PM
Originally posted by timsvw
so if I am understanding it clearly. It just renders faster and has better displacement but it is missing raytracing. Are there any benchmark facts out there to how much faster it really is compared to other renderes. To me that seems like a whole lot of money for better displacement and to be faster.
Tim
Well, there's actually quite a lot more to it than that. It's extremely memory efficient because it doesn't have to store the entire scene in memory like a raytracer - just what the camera sees. Then once a bucket has rendered, it can toss that info and reallocate memory. PRman has been notorious for being able to crunch through 80 million poly scenes without a problem. Of course these days with lazy loading and instancing, many raytracers are catching up.
Beyond the speed, displacement and motion blur, PRman uses the Renderman specification and therefore supports an extensive scene description language as well as a very well accepted shading language. It's not just the speed, it's the flexibility and capabilities of the system that have made it popular.
Raytracers in the recent past were always slower because by the nature of how they work they are doing more of an optical simulation. There are certain advantages to that (GI info piggybacking on the raytracing) but it's been generally slower than a highly optimized scanline renderer. Things are changing though. Memory Coherent raytracing, advanced grid acceleration techniques, and lazy loading of geometry and textures along with the major advances in PC CPU performance has helped bring raytracers into the mainstream.
So PRman has traditionally been a pure scanline renderer, but with PRman 11 it is becoming a hybrid scanline-raytracer. Actually I don't know enough about PRman 11 to say for sure, but based on the press release and what I've read here and there, I get the impression that the core of PRman hasn't changed much other than they have added their own ray server (a la FrankenRender).
ghZaaaRK
11-21-2002, 05:19 PM
Exact BrandonD
nothing to add :D
oh yes, Entropy was really great, not too expensive and almost efficient than a high-end Renderman...
i mean, it was a good package (Maya-Entropy) for a cheap cost.
but Nvidia is there and sucks all.
anyone does know if Nvidia'll release Entropy (unfortunetly under their label :) ) ???
bye
MCronin
11-21-2002, 05:43 PM
Originally posted by ghZaaaRK
anyone does know if Nvidia'll release Entropy (unfortunetly under their label :) ) ???
No, and I don't think they could if they wanted to. I think Nvidia's plan with buying Exluna was to use the brainiacs at Exluna, and their technology to flesh out CG and work towards hardware based rendering solutions capable of creating moition picture quality graphics in real time.
Array
11-21-2002, 06:26 PM
no.....Nvidia actually planned to accelerate the development of Entropy. Here's an e-mail from Larry Gritz regarding the subject:
Let me nip this one in the bud before it gets out of hand.
The deal with NVIDIA is quite old -- the "definitive agreement" (i.e.,
contractual point of no return) was last December, and we've been
operating as one company ever since. The plan for the merger was not
only to continue our efforts with Entropy, but to "turbo charge" them.
The fact that nobody could detect any change for several months after
the merger is, I think, a good indication that it was not disruptive
to our mission, our business, or our products.
The disappearance of Entropy and BMRT are in no way causally related
to the merger of the companies.
-- lg
--
Larry Gritz Exluna
lg@exluna.com Berkeley, CA
(for personal email, please use lg@larrygritz.com)
ghZaaaRK
11-21-2002, 07:03 PM
interesting and reassuring, thanks Array.
MCronin
11-21-2002, 07:24 PM
I'm sure they would have continued Entropy development if they could, but after the Pixar suit they cannot so we won't see Entropy again. I'm pretty sure that the "turbo charging" comment was a thinly veiled hint that their intention was to provide advanced hardware rendering via Entropy through Nvidia's hardware. Isn't it interesting that months after Exluna and Nvidia began working together all of the sudden Nvidia releases a Renderman like high level shading language? What we will see from Nvidia, probably very shortly after the FX cards ship, is a new production renderer, not Entropy, that is very Renderman like if not Renderman compliant, and supports hardware acceleration utilizing Cg as it's primary shader language. So we will most likely see a renderer, but it won't be Entropy.
Array
11-21-2002, 07:29 PM
i sure hope you're right :thumbsup:
Gentle Fury
11-21-2002, 10:31 PM
Originally posted by beaker
>>If I can render 3x faster than lets say MR, then it is still cheaper than paying $2500 for MR because I am going to get the same job done in 1/3rd the time. Time is money.
well, that being said, MR for Maya is free to maya users.........lets check the scales on that one........free, $5000........free, $5000.........hnnnnnnn free definatly sounds like the better deal to me!!!!
time may be money, but remember, money is also money :) :) :)
btw mental ray calculates displacement per pixel too.....really impressive stuff!!
Mauritius
11-22-2002, 12:15 AM
I always wonder why people are so ignorant about other RMan compliant renderers. Of course PRMan is the best if only for the reason that Pixar uses it for their own productions but Sitexgraphics' AIR, 3Delight or DotC's RenderDotC (RDC) produce absolutely indisdinguishable images (in terms of quality) as does PRMan and seldomly are they slower, in some special cases even faster.
AIR is only $300-375 per CPU.
3Delight is even free!
If you want the power of a RMan renderer (including all the nifty stuff as fast DOF & motion blur, no speed loss with high quality displacements and programmable shading, download the AIR or RDC demos, or download 3Delight (full version) or download AQSIS.
Cheers,
.mm
BrandonD
11-22-2002, 04:26 AM
Originally posted by Gentle Fury
well, that being said, MR for Maya is free to maya users.........lets check the scales on that one........free, $5000........free, $5000.........hnnnnnnn free definatly sounds like the better deal to me!!!!
time may be money, but remember, money is also money :) :) :)
btw mental ray calculates displacement per pixel too.....really impressive stuff!!
Well, not exactly. You'll still have to pay for render licenses.
sunit
11-24-2002, 10:32 PM
If you want the power of a RMan renderer (including all the nifty stuff as fast DOF & motion blur, no speed loss with high quality displacements and programmable shading, download the AIR or RDC demos, or download 3Delight (full version) or download AQSIS.
motionblurring is still a problem with air - pixar has the patent on the type of stochastic sampling prman uses to make it's motion blur fast and accurate. . .also, maybe displacements are a bit slower, but otherwise, air is quite solid,
-sunit
playmesumch00ns
11-26-2002, 03:21 PM
Originally posted by BrandonD
So PRman has traditionally been a pure scanline renderer, but with PRman 11 it is becoming a hybrid scanline-raytracer. Actually I don't know enough about PRman 11 to say for sure, but based on the press release and what I've read here and there, I get the impression that the core of PRman hasn't changed much other than they have added their own ray server (a la FrankenRender).
I think it's gotta be a frankenRender-type thing hasn't it? Incorporating raytracing into the core would probably break the REYES paradigm, and would certainly mean a hefty re-design. What amazes me is the testimony from MPC. When that first interview came out on 3DFestival, the PIXAR representative said they were just including these new features for the sake of future compatibility, and that they wouldn't be properly implemented until a new version or point release. If it's that good that MPC raved about it already, what's it going to be like by version 12?
Can't wait to get my hands on a copy, sadly that's probably not going to be for a long time now. *sigh* spose I'll have to muddle on with RAT 5.0!
nimajneb
11-27-2002, 04:15 PM
Maya has at least three bridges that I know of for Renderman renderers: MayaMAN, Liquid, and MTOR. As far as I know MAX has only one, MaxMAN, and that one's a bit out of date (no AQSIS support). Anyone out there know about other bridges for MAX?
-nimajneb
Array
11-27-2002, 05:07 PM
Originally posted by nimajneb
Maya has at least three bridges that I know of for Renderman renderers: MayaMAN, Liquid, and MTOR. As far as I know MAX has only one, MaxMAN, and that one's a bit out of date (no AQSIS support). Anyone out there know about other bridges for MAX?
-nimajneb
Why should it matter if it's out of date? as long as you can output a RIB or reset your paths to point to Aqsis you should be fine.
nimajneb
11-27-2002, 08:48 PM
Was under the impression that there are issues with Compatibility Shaders, as well as differences in how RIB's need to be output. I'm a Renderman infant however, just experimenting with MaxMAN lite are the moment, so that maybe my inexperience talking :)
-nimajneb
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