RenderMan for Maya

Everyone has heard of Pixar. Its name has become synonymous with CG blockbusters, mainly thanks to its rendering software Photoreal RenderMan. The RenderMan renderer has been in development for about 20 years and, as a result, is now one of most highly-optimised renderers for film graphics.

RenderMan is available as a standalone renderer, which 3D apps can communicate with via the RIB scene description language. There’s also a plug-in version available for Maya, which we’ve reviewed here. With RenderMan for Maya you can render your scenes directly inside Maya as you would with the native software renderer or mental ray; you just choose it from the Render Globals and away you go.

RenderMan has a neat and streamlined interface. There are only two main controls for setting the final quality, which are Shading Rate and Pixel Samples. There’s also a choice of filters and a setting for filter width. Shading Rate controls the overall quality of the shading, including the accuracy of shadows, textures and tessellation for displacements. Pixel Samples controls the anti-aliasing, and that’s it. Simple and effective.

This plug-in is already massively optimised, so there’s really no need to alter settings. RenderMan can render vast quantities of polygons with motion blur very quickly, which is the main reason it excels in film effects. It supports Subdivision Surfaces, of course, and these are rendered at a resolution so that they never appear faceted. Similarly, displacements are also blazingly fast; so fast that you can use them wherever you want without being penalised by memory requirements or severely impacting render times.

A quick test against mental ray proved our point: 400,000 polygons rendered with mental ray in 48 seconds and with RenderMan in 20 seconds. Enabling displacements caused mental ray to run out of memory, while RenderMan flew through this test in an impressive one minute 20 seconds at a very fine shading rate of 1 – and the displacements looked perfect.

Motion blur is also a key area in which RenderMan excels and, again, mental ray didn’t come close in either speed or quality. What makes these results even more impressive is that RenderMan for Maya is not multi-threaded, but mental ray is, and we were running the tests on a multi-processor machine. While RenderMan is a scanline renderer, it adds raytracing routines where they are needed and it’s here that it starts to lag. Likewise, its global illumination is not as fast as mental ray’s final gather, but it’s still quick.

This version includes a licence to use as many processors as your system has, which means you can run four RenderMan renders at the same time on a Quad CPU machine, each rendering different frame ranges. Version 1.2 currently works with Maya 7.0 only, but version 2.0 will support Maya 8.0 and will be multi-threaded, too.