[Stevan Del george]

AFAIK Renderman is still king at the “animation” houses that do CGI features – Pixar, Dreamworks, etc. But its use at VFX houses has been dwindling for years. As of last year, I believe it was still the primary renderer at ILM and MPC but all the other major VFX houses I know of use something else as their “primary” renderer. (Worth noting though that, IME, the big shops have a large collection of software that gets used here and there when it’s useful, what I’m referring to is the primary software most often used and best integrated into their primary in-house pipelines.)

The other “context” to my orignal comments, that I didn’t express well … I was thinking of the artist market is this way …
– Independent freelance artists who are completely stand-alone entities, deal with end clients directly, deliver final product directly to end clients, etc. For these artists Redshift and Octane are fantastic options.
– Artists who mostly work in large shops and occasionally work from home, also freelance at-home artists who regularly work in conjunction with large shops. For these artists staying current with “industry standard” software and renderers is very important. (I would also include in this group freelance at home artists whose current status is considered a stepping stone to getting a staff position at a large shop.)

[Stevan Del george]

I’m happy that Redshift and Octane (primarily used in the motion gfx world) are supporting Metal. But I worry that the new Arnold GPU renderer will become the industry standard in the future for a couple of reasons …
– Arnold’s use is growing rapidly in vfx houses (the heir apparent to V-Ray). Redshift is popping up in a couple of tv vfx shops, but Octane has almost zero presence in vfx. When ramping up for bigger gigs gfx shops often need to hire vfx artists and knowing/using different renderers is often a big, expensive problem. (You haven’t lived till you’ve seen an Art Director’s eyes roll back into his head when a freelancer tells him you can’t render a good looking metal logo unless you use V-Ray.)
– The Arnold GPU renderer will have a CPU renderer counterpart – this is actually a more important reason. (Redshift and Octane do not have CPU versions). This limitation has been a big reason VFX houses have been hesitant to incorporate GPU renders. GPU renderers are great at the beginning of a job (look dev, design, refinement, etc.) but typically cause a bottleneck in the last phase of the job when renders need to be at full, final quality. At that point being able to send the render to a massive farm (local or cloud) is often a big deal.
(WETA is a notable exception to this, they wrote a GPU version of their in house CPU renderer to get the best of both worlds a couple of years ago.)

[Stevan Del george]

I am also having trouble making this work. The header from the CS4 file looks like the header listed above, but my CS3 project header info/area looks nothing like it.

Could it me my CS3 AE is PPC (on a G5) so the header is different? Here is the entire text from an empty CS3 project:
RIFX

[Stevan Del george]

I am also having trouble making this work. The header from the CS4 file looks like the header listed above, but my CS3 project header info/area looks nothing like it.

Could it me my CS3 AE is PPC (on a G5) so the header is different? Here is the entire text from an empty CS3 project:
RIFX