This press release produced a lot of noise in the animation community. Pixar is to release PRman for free (for non-commercial use).
On Twitter there was a lot of tweets about this and I especially liked this one:
@Stitched: Alarmed at the number of animators who post that free Renderman is “awesome”. It’s not like suddenly your reels will look like Pixar movies.
Anyway what’s really interesting about PRman is that they have implemented path tracing, which was (until recently) only Solid Angle‘s Arnold domain. And not only PRman is also a path tracer now. Other big names in REYES rendering solutions (DNA’s 3Delight, Houdini Mantra etc. ) implemented it as well.
It’s more than clear that Arnold set a standard here.
But they showed they can keep up… and more, PRman promises much improved interior rendering speeds which was weak point in Arnold.
When PRman will be publicly available for free testing, its userbase is about to grow huge.
Even for commercial use the price of $495 is great! I’m looking forward to test it.
Clever move, Pixar!
Jakub Sporek Animations 