Two benefits were named:
1. Deciding to go with renderman gives allows you to tap a large talent pool that are already familiar with Renderman. Much larger than cycles.
2. Renderman works with a number of other 3d tools besides Blender. Cycles could work with other software, but I suspect this is a relatively niche group doing so. This means that other pieces of software could be used in conjunction with Blender.
Another way of putting it is that you can get a job working with Renderman.
What's really huge here is being able to interface open-source software with the commercial rendering pipeline that is used to make most of the movies we watch.
I had a big fight with my 3d modeling instructor who made us use 3ds max because he wrote the Adobe Press book on it, though he not very subtly suggested that we would have to pirate it in order to do our homework. I pushed really hard to be allowed to do work in Blender, wasn't a win at the time, but I think this is clearly the direction things will go - the days of paying thousands of dollars for content creating software that is primarily used by a handful of companies are numbered. Companies like Pixar and ILM should be contributing to projects like Blender instead of developing proprietary internal tools and marrying themselves to packages like Maya that aren't terribly better than Blender, if they even are better at all anymore.
Blender has some quirks, esp in modeling from what I remember, but it's solid, and more importantly, there are room for lots of tools, just not lots of tools that break the bank. This is a hobby for everyone it's not a profession for, and even the professionals are often contractors who struggle to maintain a toolkit.
> Companies like Pixar and ILM should be contributing to projects like Blender instead of developing proprietary internal tools and marrying themselves to packages like Maya that aren't terribly better than Blender, if they even are better at all anymore.
For anyone who might think the same thing:
1. This is not going to happen anytime soon.
2. The tools they use, proprietary or not, are better than blender. I know everyone loves to rally around open source software and Blender has benefited lots of people for a variety of reasons, but high end visual effects is not its place right now.
3. The large 3D programs are actually used by an enormous amount of people these days, not just the big VFX companies.
- Sony Pictures Imageworks open sourced Open Shading Language, Field3D, Alembic and OpenColorIO.
- Pixar opensourced OpenSubDiv
- Disney opensourced Ptex, BRDF Explorer, SeExpr and Partio
- Dreamworks open sourced OpenVDB
I wouldn't be too suprised if we would see an open source renderer within the next 10 years, especially if SPI is going to replace their in-house version of the Arnold renderer, as open source software has been extremely successful for SPI.
The open sourcing of C and C++ libraries in CG is awesome. But that is skewing the original point. Studios aren't going to replace their interfaces with blender and they aren't going to open source their own creation software. Most studios use a combination of maya, katana, 3ds, houdini and vray.
What you listed are mostly formats that are beneficial to everyone to share (and don't forget OpenExr). OpenSubdiv lets others match renderman's subdivision. Also Imageworks' open source push can largely be traced back to Rob Bredow I believe.
Autodesk recently made their software (including 3ds Max and Maya) free for educational/non-commercial use for 3 years. No watermarks or other restrictions.
I'm not sure why you think circumventing the license poorly is any better than using cracked software. I won't call it theft (I don't think illegal copying should be considered theft) -- but I also don't see any meaningful distinction between how you break the license and use software you haven't paid for.
