[Phil Hoppes]

I don’t know…. I think I prefer this one:

“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit…it’s the only way to be sure.”
– Ellen Ripley from Aliens

It’s a little more relevant to this forum too.

[Phil Hoppes]

Come now Aindreas, you NEED one of those when you are driving around in one of these looking for places to take pictures with one of these?

Doesn’t everybody do this? 😉

[Phil Hoppes]

Why are your shorts in such a knot over this. The company finished 2013 with an annual revenue of 170 Billion dollars, 98.9% of which was in consumer products. (If you WAG “Pro” revenue, FCPX and MacPro’s at 2 Billion dollars)

So their corporate statement and top management are from the consumer industry. This is a surprise????? Really????????

[Phil Hoppes]

I have the same issue. There is some discussion on this over on the VideoCopilot forum

Guess we will just have to wait for an update.

[Phil Hoppes]

Actually it’s quite easy to come up with 40G’s in fonts. Just on a whim I went to a professional font site (https://www.typography.com) and picked a font at random. (Acropolis). That font for webuse only is $149.00. 40K/150 = 266 fonts. That is not really that many fonts. I’m not claiming to have any knowledge of what Adobe charges or has charged in the past but fonts are not cheap. I picked up a specific font for a customer that they wanted and that was $50. By my same metric, at $50 each you only come to around 780 fonts. That’s not thousands that I believed they mentioned in the presentation so if they really have thousands of fonts, that part at least, sounds like a pretty good deal. I’m not going to get into the subscription argument, I’m just saying, thousands of fonts included is not bad, assuming they are not garbage.

[Phil Hoppes]

Yea…. Jason is such a quiet and reserved individual. It’s too bad he’s not excited about what he’s doing. 😉

[Phil Hoppes]

…. and the answer is

D) All of the above.

[Phil Hoppes]

That was simply awesome!

[Phil Hoppes]

Well, I do 3D animation primarily as my freelance work. I’ve used Mental Ray, V-Ray, Modo & Vue. Modo and Vue have their own captive render engine. I can honestly say that none of these are what one would consider artist friendly. IMHO, Modo is perhaps the easiest to set up to get decent looking quick results. That being said you need about a masters degree to get great results and a PhD to get over the top. It has been my experience that all rendering engines are quite tricky to work with. Mental Ray, for one, is one of those tools where you pull your hair out for a week until you find the one check box, 3 dialog boxes deep, that you need to uncheck for it to work on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s only when there is a full moon. There have been day’s where I’ve considered a Jack Daniels drip to get me by.

So, no, while I’ve not used Renderman, my expectation is that it is not simple to set up, not simple to get good results and not simple to use. That being said, $500 is dirt cheap and free to just try it and look at what you can do with it is a no brainer.

[Phil Hoppes]

That’s quite impressive. Thanks for the post. One has to ask why drop greater than a $1K for V-Ray, Arnold or Maxwell when you can get Renderman for free. Granted all of those other rendering engines have some unique capabilities that are quite nice but it begs the question do you really need it vs the cost delta. Sometime, sure but often no.

The fine print… It is not exactly free. It is free for Non-Commercial use but still at $500 for paid commercial license that is less than half the cost of V-Ray. That is going to put some hurt on other render engine suppliers for sure.