Is renderman a good alternative to arnold?

#1

The non-commercial version is free which is great. However it doesnt seem like theres much buzz around it. Im not seeing many tutorials (besides its own site) or workflows. Vray was always top when it came to that and now im starting to see a lot more Arnold which is crazy because I remember never finding anything.

Renderman though gives my test models a good look. Its hard to describe. Is renderman and arnold the same under the hood? Do they have the same method of rendering I guess im asking. For some reason I feel I get better looks with renderman but that may be my lack of experience in arnold.

Ive seen that youtube video with some guy that demonstrates both of them in different scenes and I think renderman “won” in a sense compared to arnold in most areas. Obviously thats not an end all situation.

Im just wondering why theres not much material on it.

#2

Hi,
Renderman used to be the industry standard about 15/20 years ago but its implementation as an api with MtoR (Maya to Renderman) was very buggy in terms of the whole Slim palette thing so companies dropped it or found less buggy in-house ways of implementing it. Also at the time it was mainly a scanline renderer- and raytracing was just beginning to take off.
They had some pretty cool ideas though at the time like csg (constructive solid geometry) essentially true boolean geometry, level of detail controls, string context driven palettes (ie you could set a shader palette with specific textures for certain times of day and get the user to type afternoon say and it would come up with the appropriate colour palette (its how they did toy story supposedly). I’ve not seen any of these ideas implemented in vray or mental ray. I have no idea what its like now but it would be interesting to know if they’ve fixed the flakiness! Also there used to be tons of reasonably thorough documentation through the help menu. There are a few technical books out there: Advanced renderman was one of the more readable ones although i’m not sure if its still in print. It’ll probably help with understanding the principles behind using the renderer (it covers how to code your own shaders from scratch) but it definitely won’t tell you what button to click. Not sure if that helps though! Good luck with using it!