Hi Matt,
I understand how markets work and prices are formed, I should have phrased
it differently:
I'm surprised this relatively small market supports so many products doing
more or less the same thing.
As for realtime renderers, having worked in games for half of my career,
I've seen this coming
too for the last ten years. So far I see the problems that make people not
adopt realtime renderes for everything in the lack of flexibility -
usually there are additional techical prerequisites that need to be met by
assets in order to be usable by the render engine, and that creates
additional cost on the artist side (the expensive end of the pipe),
whereas CPU compute time is relatively cheap. I think the image quality
can already be right for many things, not just the classic realtime
applications/games.
Congrats on Wildstar going gold btw, it looks totally awesome!
Stefan
Prices are coming down because it's a nearly fixed-size market. If you
price yourself too high, you won't get a cut of the pie.
There's also a shift in moving towards real time renderers and away from
software renderers. Real time isn't quite ready for full prime time for
film/video, but it is proving capable for many scenarios. This is
probably the main instigator of price reductions from the likes of
Renderman as the writing is on the wall how much longer it will remain
relevant in the general consumer space outside of large film productions
that have established pipelines around it.
In general, industry is producing more real time applications instead of
linear format. Expect to see less need for 3rd party renderers in
general, and more demand for real time engines and editing environments.
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stefan
Kubicek
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2014 9:18 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Renderman price restructuring
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
--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at [email protected]
-- This email and its attachments are --
--confidential and for the recipient only--
--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at [email protected]
-- This email and its attachments are --
--confidential and for the recipient only--
