Rendering Novice Question

#1

Hello

I have been modeling for a while and am an intermediate user with maya.

Rendering was never an area I focused on.

Renderman’s reputation precedes it. Especially with the NC version to try it is great.

A lot of people are saying that if you’re not a coder or write your own shaders renderman is pointless.

I want to use renderman to combine cgi in my visual art and photography (so mainly stills).

Is renderman the right tool for what I want to accomplish or would you consider it too burdensome to invest time in learning to write my own shaders to get what I want out of it? Or can I get good results with some time invested in how to use it without needing to code/write shaders.

Is there other software you’d recommend for my specific purposes?

In other words what advice or feedback do you have for someone like me?

Thanks

Nick

#2

Renderman has historically shone in larger productions, specifically for animation. These days you don’t have to be a highly technical user or shader writer to get nice results out of it, but I’m assuming you are mostly going to be rendering still images? mental ray is probably going to be just as good for anything you need to do, however you should have a play around with Renderman anyway and see if it’s different workflows appeal to you more!

You almost can’t go wrong these days when choosing a renderer, they’re all very capable!

#3

Yeah that’s the conclusion I came to.

I’m diving full on into renderman and it’s awesome so far.

Here is an answer I got from a user in the renderman forum. Hopefully this thread can help anyone in the future with the same concerns.

It probably depends on who told you that it’s pointless unless you know how to code… Either they favor a different renderer or at least they haven’t tried out the latest versions. The statement might have been true a couple of years ago, but it improved a lot by version 18 and now since the NC (version 19 and 20) this is absolutely not the case anymore. You get a bunch of production shaders with it coming from Disney and Pixar which they used on their movies (you might have seen one or two?) and they also ship a bunch of presets that make it even easier to get that clean look you might like right away or at least give you a good starting point to tweak the parameters to your needs. In my opinion it is as easy to use as Arnold and V-Ray whose big selling point was their usability compared to RenderMan, but on top or rather under the hood you have an amazingly customizable engine that - if you’re willing to go further down a technical path - will provide you very powerful opportunities to create something outside the box and be creative in a programmable way. :wink: I hope that somewhat answers your question. But bare in mind this place might be a bit biased to get a objective answer, me included. :slight_smile: