How difficult is it to learn Renderman?

[Kvothe 1]

I'm not super experienced with rendering, and I like what I've heard and seen from Renderman, but wow it look difficult to learn. Is it too impractical for a relative newbie ? How would one go about learning it, if new to rendering altogether?

[schwungsau 272]

RenderMan is like most modern render engine. with path tracing you getting very good results but RenderMan is the most flexible render engine. if wanna speed your render 3 times or 10 times, you can dig into a rabbit hole. so have completely understood the rendering at the beginning, only if you optimize hell of it, you will learn/need different techniques (bi directional path tracing, manifold etc...) but this makes rendering like 4-5 times faster then Arnold/karma.

thats a good start :

 

for optimizing etc... Pixar Renderman sites have some good tutorials.

and there are dozen of sites, which teach physicals based shading etc... it applies to all modern render engine

https://marmoset.co/posts/basic-theory-of-physically-based-rendering/

 

 

[Kvothe 1]

On 8/23/2020 at 4:00 PM, schwungsau said:

RenderMan is like most modern render engine. with path tracing you getting very good results but RenderMan is the most flexible render engine. if wanna speed your render 3 times or 10 times, you can dig into a rabbit hole. so have completely understood the rendering at the beginning, only if you optimize hell of it, you will learn/need different techniques (bi directional path tracing, manifold etc...) but this makes rendering like 4-5 times faster then Arnold/karma.

thats a good start :

 

for optimizing etc... Pixar Renderman sites have some good tutorials.

and there are dozen of sites, which teach physicals based shading etc... it applies to all modern render engine

https://marmoset.co/posts/basic-theory-of-physically-based-rendering/

 

 

Is it much harder than Arnold? How much harder?

[flcc 81]

Even if this is not quite true, it can be considered that the more flexible the engine is, the less easy it is to use.

It all depends on what you want.
Ease, speed, flexibility?
If you are looking for an easy and fast renderer go to Octane.
If you are looking for a powerful and flexible renderer go to renderman. (don't know about Karma yet).
Between the two you can choose Arnold or redshift. The advantage of redshift is its speed, which does not require a lot of optimization work.

[Howitzer99 20]

I've used RenderMan for many years professionally, but for my own projects, I rely on Redshift for speed, and Arnold for higher quality (especially volumes).

There are troves of information regarding any modern renderer online, so learning is much less of an issue these days.

As Fred mentioned above, Redshift is pretty easy to use out of the box, and the implementation inside of Houdini is solid.

You really can't go wrong with any of the renderers mentioned in these posts.  And most offer free or trial licenses.