Arnold Vs Renderman

#1

Hello, I’m Miguel Marquez the new Animator of my animation studio for NDCUniversal Laka Animation Studios and I have been using Arnold for my 2 demo reels and 1 RenderMan demo on character animation and another Arnold Demo I’m working on right now. so I was wondering Which is more simple to use in Maya Arnold Or Renderman? Or should I say what are your opinions on them?

#2

I prefer the first name Arnold.

#3

I don’t use either, but basically:

  1. Arnold is more for people who prefer simple setup and high quality results
  2. Renderman is supremely programmable and has been since the very beginning. So if you can write custom shader code, for example, you can get Renderman to render just about anything imaginable, and possibly at very fast speeds as well.

Arnold is more for artists who want to use a GUI. Renderman is more for serious programmers who want to totally customize the way things are rendered by the renderer.

#4

that isnt true for the latest renderman version… its much easier… just use the pixar shaders and hit render…
it isnt more complicated than arnold or vray…

#5

Pixar Surface Textures don’t show up in Maya viewport. I use normal Maya 2D Texture and Renderman renders it. With all other Maya surfaces you have to replace them with Pixar Surfaces

With both Renderman and Arnold you have to learn about their unique lights and materials too.

Chose Renderman myself for personal work, plus can batch render for non-commercial use for free.
I like Renderman’s Denoise feature in Render Settings.
Pixar Dome Light gives nice quick ambient occlusion.

#6

What I meant is that if you DO have programming and shader writing skills, Renderman is a deep renderer that really lets you put those skills to good use.

Its nice to hear that Pixar have made Renderman more accessible of late. It used to be an expensive, techy and somewhat exclusive high-end renderer back in the old days that you couldn’t just take of a quick spin.

#7

Renderman I think is more capable and costs less than Arnold

#8

If you have seen the demos of renderman 22 due first half of this year, and XPU, Pixar’s CPU/GPU renderer under development, I feel pretty excited with RenderMan’s R&D strength.

#9

Also, Autodesk now owns Arnold which doesn’t bode well. Autodesk doesn’t need Arnold to survive and could cut funding and raise prices at any time.

Pixar has been developing and selling Renderman since forever and is core to their business. It has far more developer resources than Arnold

#10

Pixar virtually invented high-quality 3D rendering, so yeah, Renderman is strong on R&D and always has been.

The mistake Pixar made with Renderman was to keep it exclusive - it was way too expensive for the average CG artist to use back when I did CG.

If they had lowered the priced on PRMan 10 years ago, it might have been the dominant renderer today.

Instead render engines like VRay stepped in and took much of the market.

#11

Renderman was never “exclusive” compared to the likes of VRay. Renderman was developed for a completely different market than VRay, i.e. highly customized massive scale film production pipelines. There were no mistakes made with Renderman. It served, and continues to serve, its intended purpose as a robust and high quality film production renderer.

#12

Hey! This is a very late reply, but what exactly do you mean by shader code? Isn’t it good to just use the Pxrsurface and plug textures into it?

Or should you learn coding to make the render better? I juts downloaded the engine today and it was a very terrible result that came out of it.
My textures werent bad, specular decent etc. And almost used highest sampling in render settings but did not look like a render [In a bad way]
Do you think this has something to do with it?

#13

Programmers program shader code for new shaders if existing ones won’t do the job. 3D artists use the tools and you can achieve most things with the existing tools. So learning the current tools is probably where you want to start before you think about learning to program new tools

#14

Autodesk now possesses Arnold which doesn’t look good. Autodesk needn’t bother with Arnold to endure and could cut subsidizing and raise costs whenever. Pixar has been creating disney hub login and selling Renderman since everlastingly and is center to their business. It has unquestionably more designer assets than Arnold

#15

I wouldn’t say Autodesk has ruined Arnold at all

Autodesk has made Arnold much more affordable than it was before they were bought out. It’s now a subscription, but its pricing is at least competitive now for everyone. It’s also received several major updates since Autodesk got involved.