Unfortunately they abandon Renderman totally. Now RM 23 is out with a free nc license. Could be a big beast for blender. But for some reason, they don't care anymore. During his 23 year career at Pixar, Wayne is credited in all of Pixar's films since 'A Bug's Life'. Wayne has developed core RenderMan code for ray tracing, shading languages, texture caches, and system architecture. He lives in Seattle and enjoys photography, hiking, and making beer.
RenderMan Licensing
RenderMan has a flexible licensing system. A single RenderMan License can be used either for batch rendering or for rendering with an artist seat.
Floating or Node Locked
Choose between floating and node locked licensing. Floating RenderMan licenses can be distributed across a network as needed, allowing the full utilization of all licenses on the renderfarm to achieve top performance. On the other hand, node locked licenses offer ease of installation and are an efficient solution for a single workstation.
Pricing
RenderMan (includes Tractor) . . $595 USD per license
RenderMan Annual Maintenance . . $250 USD per license
Tractor (stand alone). . . . . . $100 USD per license
Tractor Annual Maintenance . . . $20 USD per license
Cloud Services
There are several RenderMan solutions for rendering in the cloud, providing extraordinary burst capacity.
Rentals
Licensing is per day, with a minimum of 10 licenses for 7 days.
RenderMan Rental. . . . . . . . . $5 USD per License
Upgrades
Upgrades are free for users with current maintenance and can be upgraded online using your User Profile ▶
Upgrades can be purchased directly, please contact RenderMan Sales ▶
Get Your Quote Today
We are happy to help you determine the best configuration for your needs. Write us to request a custom quote for any configuration, from a single license, to a site license, or temporary burst capacity. Request a quote ▶
Looking for the RenderMan Installer?
Download the RenderMan Installer from the download section in your user account.
Need Help Installing?
Please visit our Installation Docs for step-by-step instructions or visit our Answers platform for personalized support:
North American Schools
For schools commited to offering studies in RenderMan, we're are happy to provide a reasonable donation and help you find a solution for your purposes.
Request a Quote ▶
International Schools
For schools outside of North America, please contact the RenderMan Reseller in your area above.
Students and Educators
Students and educators qualify for Free Non-Commercial RenderMan.
Download & Install ▶
Looking for information on RenderMan version 23?
The newest version of RenderMan has just shipped and we have a great list of frequently asked questions to get you up to speed on the latest developments with RenderMan.
What options do I have to purchase RenderMan?
There are two options to choose from:
- Purchase RenderMan direct from Pixar - Request A Quote ▶
- Purchase RenderMan directly from your Authorized Reseller
What is the pricing of RenderMan?
RenderMan costs $595 per license, and provides access to the batch renderer and all of the interfaces to all supported authoring applications. One free license of Tractor is also included with every license of RenderMan. Please contact rendermansales@pixar.com or your local reseller where we can configure compelling packages tailored for your specific requirements.
Are RenderMan licenses either floating or node-locked?
Commercial RenderMan licenses by default are floating providing the flexibility to deploy RenderMan anywhere on your network. Node-locked licenses can be made available upon request.
What does RenderMan maintenance provide?
Yearly maintenance is $250 per RenderMan license for commercial users and includes full support, upgrades, and beta access within a 1-year term.
Is maintenance on Tractor available and what does it cover?
Yes, maintenance is $20 per Tractor license for commercial users and includes full support and upgrades within a 1-year term.
How can I upgrade to the latest version of RenderMan?
It’s easy to upgrade to RenderMan, simply go here: Automatic RenderMan Upgrade.
If I upgrade to the latest version of RenderMan, can I still use previous versions?
Yes. Older versions of RenderMan will still continue to function even after you upgrade, and commercial users have access to archives of previous version of RenderMan.
Are previous versions of RenderMan still available for NCR?
No. Non-Commercial RenderMan only supports the latest version of RenderMan. If you'd like to install a previous version, you may purchase a license which will give you access to previous versions of RenderMan. Since Non-Commercial RenderMan is free, we only have the resources to support one version at a time.
Which is the current Non-Commercial version?
Non-Commercial and commercial RenderMan are both at version 23.
Where can I find more information about RenderMan pricing?
Please write us on our Contact Page with your questions. One of our specialists will help you learn more about Pixar's RenderMan.
Are cloud rendering services available for RenderMan?
Yes. Several cloud services providing RenderMan metered by the minute or hour are available, including Google Zync and Rayvision. More services are being added. Please write RenderMan Sales for updates.
More Info About RenderMan?
For questions related to the RenderMan Products contact RenderMan Sales, and one of our RenderMan specialists will help you learn more about Pixar's RenderMan. Contact RenderMan Sales.
World's Most Versatile Renderer
With a new state-of-the-art framework optimized for physically-based rendering, RenderMan can deliver unmatched flexibility for any production pipeline.
Outstanding Features, Performance, and Price - See what RenderMan can do for your creative vision.
Production Proven
Not only is RenderMan used for our own feature films at Pixar, it is also used throughout the industry for rendering Visual Effects and animation, making scalability and versatility one of its core strengths.
That's Show Business
Because RenderMan has been used on every kind of production, the software has already been pushed to every extreme, so it's ready to render anything you can throw at it. Just take a look at some of these movies...
2020
A Quiet Place Part II
Artemis Fowl
Black Widow
Clifford the Red Big Dog
Dolittle
Jungle Cruise
No Time to Die
Onward
The Old Guard
Sonic the Hedgehog
Soul
The Call of the Wild
The New Mutants
The Willoughbys
Top Gun: Maverick
Underwater
Pixar Technology
Now you can get out-of-box production tools straight from Pixar Animation Studios, including materials and light transport...no development required.
Photorealistic Images
Physically based shading allows RenderMan to deliver highly realistic lighting with minimal setup, including full support for multi-bounce ray traced global illumination and ray traced subsurface scattering. Much research and development has gone into making these traditionally expensive effects a production reality.
Created for Artists
Materials come fully loaded with all of the creative options for look development demanded by the shading artists at Pixar. Use Pixar Surface to create everything from glass to the most incredibly subtle skin you can image … and layer them on top of each other, for unlimited types of looks.
Analytic Physical Lighting
This new library of physically based lights offers standard features like color temperature, exposure, and IES profiles … but also includes specialized Light Filters which have been developed for feature film.
Physical and Artistic Hair
New artistic controls allow artists to control subtle nuances and variation in color and sheen, while also providing a more natural response to light with improved energy conservation
Extensive plugin support
RenderMan has seamless Xgen integration with Maya and supports the leading plugins, including Joe Alter's Shave and Haircut and Peregrine Labs' Yeti.
Built for Collaboration
RenderMan ships with the latest open source tools and comprehensive APIs so you can develop complex collaborative environments, for maximum pipeline flexibility
Inside Out © Disney/Pixar
Renderman Blender Plugin
For studios using the latest pipeline tech, RenderMan can render directly to USD Hydra. Learn how Pixar uses USD in our Pipeline.
SideFX Solaris
A key aspect of RenderMan version 23 is support for the new Houdini 18 native USD “Solaris” workflows, enabled by RenderMan’s USD Hydra delegate. These new tools are the result of close collaboration between SideFX and Pixar’s RenderMan & USD teams
Digital Humans
RenderMan's subsurface approach significantly increases quality and realism when rendering skin and other soft or delicate materials.
Better Skin & Soft Materials
RenderMan was the first VFX commercial renderer in the industry to ship with a physically based model for subsurface scattering, a truly accurate model for photorealistic skin based on deep path tracing and albedo controls. Check out a great article on the revolutionary VFX by Industrial Light & Magic on The Irishman.
Integrators
RenderMan has a unique way of dealing with light transport, by giving artists and developers creative control over camera rays.
Cutting-Edge Light Transport
RenderMan provides 3 out-of-the-box production integrators, including Pixar's own integrator, Pixar Unified, which has been battle tested in all productions since Finding Dory and includes the latest tech innovations for Toy Story 4.
Maximum Flexibility
The integrator system provides all the necessary tools for studios to write their own integrators, allowing development teams creative and non-destructive freedom to experiment with cutting-edge technology, as exemplified in this Non-Photorealistic Rendering case study by Lollipop Shaders.
Volumes & Particles
Smoke, fire, clouds, dust, OpenVDB... RenderMan can render it better and faster than ever.
Checkpointing
RenderMan has the ability to resume interrupted renders, redefining the animation approval process.
Happier Dailies
Checkpointing allows the renderer to make repeated passes over the image, refining it a bit more with each pass. While the image will be quite noisy during the initial passes, it is usually sufficient to give an impression of how the final image will look, instead of having to wait for a final frame, allowing daily reviews and more iterations of animated sequences.
Straight from the Source
Learn how checkpointing is helping the award-winning work at MPC.
Advanced Hair Shading
RenderMan handles fur and hair fast and efficiently using the industry-leading Pixar Marschner Hair, developed at Pixar Animation Studios for feature film production.
Onward © Disney/Pixar
Displacements are a core strength of RenderMan. With support for 32bit maps, PTEX, and vector displacements which can all be edited interactively.
Secondary Passes
RenderMan AOV and LPE passes can be edited interactively, providing artist friendly and robust workflows for compositing.
Compositors Rejoice!
RenderMan provides elegant methods for breaking visual effects down into secondary passes for compositing, including DeepEXR and Cryptomatte support. With support for both AOVs and Light Path Expressions, RenderMan offers a multitude of ways of writing any element of a render (SSS, Diffuse, Shadows, Z-Depth, Object IDs, Per-Light AOVs, etc.) into many popular formats.
Intuitive Holdout Workflow
Compositing CGI elements over live action is crucial for VFX work and the new Holdout Workflow in RenderMan makes this process simple, making it straight forward to capture shadows, reflections, and other elements to combine them with a background plate during interactive rendering.
Secondary Passes
RenderMan AOV and LPE passes provide robust workflows for compositing.
Compositors Rejoice!
RenderMan provides elegant methods for breaking visual effects down into secondary passes for compositing, including DeepEXR and Cryptomatte support. With support for both AOVs and Light Path Expressions, RenderMan offers a multitude of ways of writing any element of a render (SSS, Diffuse, Shadows, Z-Depth, Object IDs, Per-Light AOVs, etc.) into many popular formats.
Intuitive Holdout Workflow
Compositing CGI elements over live action is crucial for VFX work and the new Holdout Workflow in RenderMan makes this process simple, making it straight forward to capture shadows, reflections, and other elements to combine them with a background plate during interactive rendering.
'We approached Finding Dory as if we had a live-action camera'-Ian Megibben - Director of Photography Finding Dory
Renderman Vs Blender
Production Denoising
RenderMan ships with a production-ready Denoiser, which includes optimizations for Intel CPUs, and CUDA acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs.
The Easy Button!
Clean up sampling noise 2-4x faster with RenderMan's Denoiser! Developed by Disney for Big Hero 6, the Denoiser has been used on all Pixar films since Finding Dory. It has recently been upgraded with several new features, including full Intel CPU code vectorization. For Zootopia, Disney optimized the Denoiser to handle lots of fur and hair, while at Pixar the Denoiser was extended to support GPU acceleration, reducing the time required to denoise a feature film frame to seconds.
RenderMan on the Cloud
RenderMan can be used seamlessly with the leading Cloud Rendering solutions. Expand the circle below to read about how Milk VFX rendered 77 million 4K frames.
77 Million Frames
Milk VFX chose RenderMan to deliver the very ambitious Dinosaurs in the Wild, and thanks to Google Zync, they were able to deliver 77 million frames at 4K resolution in under 3 months. Without the cloud, the same render could have taken 2 or 3 years to pull off. Take a look at the case study.
RenderMan on the Cloud
RenderMan can be used seamlessly with the leading Cloud Rendering solutions. Expand the circle below to read about how Milk VFX rendered 77 million 4K frames.
77 Million Frames
Renderman Blender 2.9
Milk VFX chose RenderMan to deliver the very ambitious Dinosaurs in the Wild, and thanks to Google Zync, they were able to deliver 77 million frames at 4K resolution in under 3 months. Without the cloud, the same render could have taken 2 or 3 years to pull off. Take a look at the case study.
RenderMan on Demand
There are several RenderMan solutions for rendering in the cloud, providing extraordinary burst capacity.
Fully Featured Camera
RenderMan's motion blur and depth-of-field can mimic the behavior of real-world cameras, so RenderMan's synthetic images can realistically simulate their conventionally filmed counterparts.
VR Ready
Renderman Blender Tutorial
RenderMan is fully capable of delivering high-resolution animation for VR, including the new omnidirectional stereo. Simply render with the VR camera.
Motion Blur
In live action film, motion blur is the result of objects moving during the exposure of the film. The faster the exposure, the less things will blur. Conversely, a long exposure results in more motion blur. Audiences are quite familiar with the look of motion blur and creating this effect in 3D fast and efficiently is critical for convincing visual effects. Pixar's RenderMan can mimic the behavior of real cameras, with extraordinarily fast 3D motion blur.
By default, RenderMan renders scenes with an instantaneous shutter speed, an exposure which is impossible in the real world. However, without motion blur the effect would look unnatural, as moving objects would strobe across the screen, causing temporal aliasing. Thankfully RenderMan is extremely efficient at rendering motion blur and has a number of options to help tune the final look.
Depth of Field
In the real world, when a camera focuses on a close object, the background can go blurry. This effect is known as the depth of field, and Pixar's RenderMan offers many controls for creating this effect. With Pixar's RenderMan, we can decide, depending on requirements, whether we want finite or infinite depth of field, an instantaneous shutter speed or a long one to create motion blur.
RenderMan provides us with several options to control how our virtual camera behaves, which is important for creating believable 3D imagery. Depth of Field in RenderMan is dependent on three main factors: the focal length of the lens, the diameter of the aperture, and the focal distance of the camera. With these controls RenderMan can convincingly emulate real film cameras.
Production Proven Render Management
Included with every purchase of RenderMan, Tractor is a modern and robust solution for network rendering, currently deployed at some of the biggest VFX studios in the industry.