What to render with?

[Omita]

I think that all renders for Maya are good and adiquate for Production work. It depends on what you want to do, how fast you need them to render... stuff like that.

GI and other new toys are cool but take a long time to render, so few production environments can afford the time.

=Omita

[gmask]

Originally posted by TickTock
I hear all the time about how great Mental Ray and RenderMan are, but everything has it's faults... All I would like to know is what render engine is going to give me some good results fairly quickly, and some awesome results with a little more effort. Even if it's not MR or MTOR, all opinions are welcome. Of course, let's not start a huge debate over which is better, just all the good points about your favorite render will do. Thanks.

Renderman can be extremely fast to render but has a steep learning curve. Features such as raytracinghave been added recently are currently slower than other solutions. Renderman is extremely expensive.

Mental Ray easier to learn but is more expensive both licencse wise and time wise but has a very fast raytracer and creates better results than Maya standard renderer.

Maya's standard renderer can do quite alot if you are willing to fake it. Requires alot of tweaking to optimize memory usage and prioduce quality. You can render on as many machines as your heart desires practically which is nice.

[TickTock]

Good points... As of right now, my little "in-house" prod. company is looking at Renderman pretty seriously. (I say "in-house" because our computers are really IN my house. Which gets to be an issue with my wife, but that's another story altogether.) Are there any other mostly decent renderers out there? Or is it pretty well nailed down to Renderman and Mental Ray? I like MR's seating into Maya, but Renderman just sounds better, for us anyway. As for the steep learning curve, one of the guys on my team is a technical writer who picked up the safety laws of Ohio well enough to write a book about it in less than a month. Not bad, considering we all live in Utah. So I think he could probably hit Renderman pretty hard in that respect. Anyway, thanks for the input, guys, it's really helping us out. Any other thoughts, or at least opnions are very much appreciated. (Especially if they are in reference to any other render engines.) Thanks again.

PS. Money for a good renderer is not much of an issue unless we're talking a huge amount... Apparently technical writing is a very well-paid profession!

[rendermaniac]

The cool thing about RenderMan is that you don't have to use Pixar's PRman (although it is the most mature and very fast). If you just get MTOR without PRman you can use it with 3Delight (http://www.3delight.com) which has really good developers, basic raytracing and runs on windows/linux/Mac OSX, AIR (http://www.sitexgraphics.com) which is really fast and has GI, RenderDotC (http://www.dotcsw.com) which is cheaper than PRman and pretty mature. Pixar is not the only choice for rendering now - although PRman is still recommended.

PS for RenderMan news see http://www.renderman.org or my sig.

Simon

[rendermaniac]

Originally posted by TickTock
PS. Money for a good renderer is not much of an issue unless we're talking a huge amount... Apparently technical writing is a very well-paid profession!

Pixar's renderer PRman is US$5000 per processor. Depends what your definition of a lot of money is!

[Gelfling]

I hated the Maya render. It was not until I forced myself over two week's to suffer learning it. It is very workable but does take effort especially at first.

If money is no option then for sure go for Renderman. Just be prepared for even deeper learning.

They ALL can produce satisfactory results and have proof all over this board.

[playmesumch00ns]

Don't forget that on top of the fee for PRMan, there's an extra $10,000 for RAT, which you _need_ to get the best out of PRMan.

As for the other renderers, there is of course LiquidMaya (free), or MayaMan (~$1000) for getting RIB out of Maya.

If you're doing production with any of these there are more headaches, as I discovered for the first time this fortnight. Not only have you got the steep learning curve (but I love learning so that's been fun - SL/Slim is lovely!), you've got the added problems of writing your own anti-aliasing functions (better brush up on integration) if you want to use procedural shaders ( "No, that shader's not flickering, it's sparkling..."). Then there's the almighty problem of what to do with all the bloody RIB! If you're generating 25MB per frame (and that's not all that much, and yes I did use GZip'ed Binary), it's fine for doing test renders, but try rendering 20,000 frames. That's half a Terabyte of data with nowhere to go. You can work around this by rendering in passes, but then you've got 5 or 10 times as many image files to deal with. Oh yeah, and the RIB often takes three times longer to generate than the frame does to render!

What I am trying to say is this. Up until 3 weeks ago I would have sung the praises of renderman (specifically PRMan 10) till the cows came home. I still love it and believe there is no better choice for production rendering (you can keep your smelly GI/Raytracing), but be aware of the factors I mentioned above. It is most certainly _not_ a fire-and-forget renderer.

Having said all that, Renderman (particularly SL) is a beautiful thing.

If your tech guy's good at picking stuff up, I'd suggest have him play around with the Maya renderer for a couple of weeks to see what ticks. It should be more than adequate for what you want to do, and I think your time might be better spent on getting the most out of Maya before you go chucking huge amounts of money at Pixar.

Good luck, and don't forget to post anything you produce!

[beaker]

>>Don't forget that on top of the fee for PRMan, there's an extra $10,000 for RAT, which you _need_ to get the best out of PRMan.

RAT includes a copy of PRman, so all the other tools are $3k, not 10k.

[playmesumch00ns]

Oops. My bad - university bought our copies!

[TickTock]

Thanks a ton for all the input. I had to take a dear friend of mine to her military unit today and she'll be gone for an extended time, so I didn't have much time to look in today. However, when I finally got home and walked in the door, I noticed a very colorful installer running on our XP 2100 machine. Turns out that my tech guy decided $8000 was worth shelling out and he snagged us a copy of RAT. I've had one hour to play with it, and I must agree, playmesumch00ns, that SLIM is the best thing to hit Maya since.... well... anything, I guess. I'll have to see aboiut getting the guys to put some renders together, but we're still playing. (Not to mention that aside from RAT, we also apparently purchased, on me this time, Next Limit's Real Flow and Real Wave, so we're very excited about some nice liquid renders also.) Could be a while on both of those since we all have other jobs and families. We'll see! Thanks again, and keep us all updated on your current projects and any other utilities!

[dmaas]

The approach I've taken is to get a minimal number of PRMan licenses, use PRMan for developing shots, then switch to one of the free RenderMan renderers for final renders, if possible. I say "if possible" because ALL of the free renderers have bugs in various areas, so you may not be able to successfully render a given shot in anything except for PRMan, depending on what features it requires.

PRMan is great for shot development because it's an extremely fast (if not the fastest) RenderMan-compatible renderer, and the SL compiler gives very good warning messages if you screw up (though this is less relevant if you're using Slim).

Beware that you can't mix frames from different renderers in the same shot, due to differences in antialiasing and the noise() function.

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