This was my impression too, when it comes for ootb shaders Arnold leaves a
lot to be desired.
I'd even go as far as saying that is more so with Arnold than with any
other third party renderer I've used so far - if it wasn't for third party
shaders generously made available you wouldn't get too far with it.
It's been interesting to see entry price levels coming so much down in
recent years. Vray used to be the cheapest, production-ready renderer one
could buy 12 years ago (and you got unlimited render nodes per license),
today, like Arnold, it's amongst the more expensive ones, with Redshift
and even PRMan being more affordable, let alone 3Delight, which was always
zero $ for the the first license (and supports practically any shader in
Softimage). In any way, I never expected to see complex, "niche" software
products to come down in price that much. Just cut throat competition, or
is there really so much money to be made that it still pays off to sell so
cheap? At least I think the price cut and free for non-com use of PRMan is
an attempt to keep what's left of their market share, they must have lost
a lot of ground to Arnold in recent years.
Arnold you get
While I’m still on honeymoon with Arnold I have to say that its ‘out of
the box’ shaders leave quite some room for improvement.
Examples:
Standard shader: lacks a second specular layer (quite the standard these
days), back facing is not textureable
Fur shader: you only get 'Kajija-Kay’ (very old school) shading, no
indirect specular, no translucency, no glints
Single scatter SSS is only a function in the API and currently does not
implement indirect lighting.
While some of these deficits can be solved in the render tree, others
are simply not accessible without coding them yourself or relying on
community generosity. Which has been the situation for the past four
years.
That being said, Anders Langlands is now working at Solid Angle as a
shader developer. He has previously shared shaders that address a lot of
the above and beyond. I see a bright future ;-)
Happy Rendering,
Andy
On May 30, 2014, at 14:19, Marc-Andre Carbonneau
<[email protected]> wrote:
Ya...what they don't tell you is the hidden cost of programmers you
have to pay to get it working afterwards...
Viva Arnold!
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Leendert
A. Hartog
Sent: 30 mai 2014 07:41
To: [email protected]
Subject: Renderman price restructuring
Some industry nice that might interest some of you (I hope):
"Pixar has announced a radical price restructuring of its RenderMan 3D
and animation technology. With the upcoming version, the software will
be free to non-commercial customers, and will cost $495 for individual
licenses"
Quoted from here: http://waa.ai/4jn8
Or better yet: go to the appropriate page on the Renderman website
directly http://tinyurl.com/nkbmw8u
crossposted from the si-community, BTW
Greetz
Leendert
--
Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue
Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com
--
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