Cycles vs. Renderman

Hello

I installed Renderman yesterday and some people says Renderman is better, so I created an scene with the same objects but with complex materials to compare both renderers.

For Renderman I used PxrLMSubsurface, PxrGlass and PxrDiffuse.

For Cycles I used Glass material, Difusse Material and a custom material using translucent, glossy and volume scatter and absorption.

Here’s the tests

Renderman:



(Min samples: 32, Max samples: 48, Time: 09 mintues 10 seconds)

Cycles:



(Samples: 48, Time: 07 minutes 20 seconds)

In conclusion Cycles is faster than Renderman, but the colors in Renderman has more contrast than in Cycles, also the SSS material in Renderman looks better than in Cycles (maybe I’m not so good at making materials as I thought :p), but cycles gives more freedom than Renderman in materials creation (or at least in Blender). So I think Cycles is good enough to make great things as well as Renderman and Arnold, also it’s free, so if you want to start a project but you don’t have enough money to buy a professional renderer, you can use Cycles and have a high quality render.

Here’s the file if you want to try to render it:

untitled.blend (875 KB)

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I hear renderman is made for very complex / large scenes, cycles is good for average scenes though.

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sss material is way too complicated. Additionally you want to use a box without one face then go into edit mode and separate each face and add a material. This is why your scene is taking so long to clear as the gaps means the light bounce calculations go up.

That being said you are correct in your conclusions. Renderman is not for us :slight_smile:

Also a 85MB Renderer (Cycles) is as good as a 500MB Renderer (Renderman), So Pixar should learn something from Blender :cool:

While I do like to use renderman…

I’m already used to cycles and renderman runs painfully slow in my computer…(I can’t really blame it)

Great test.

Now add 100 GB of textures, at least tens of millions more faces, volumetrics, shallow depth of field, camera / transformation / deformation motion blur, lots of hair, and skin shaders, then report back.

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+1 it’s stupid to compare them.

Maybe if you make a big scene with exactly the same render and knowledge of the two render engines.
Wait to have the Offficial and finish version of renderman, here you compare an Addon in alpha with cycles.

Cycles is faster only with this kind of simple scenes. Otherwise Renderman will outperform Cycles in a big way. Plus, add the denoiser and the physical camera (just to name the latest goodies added to renderman) and you have something that cycles unfortunately can’t do yet.

Anyway, as @Pitiwazou said, you can’t really compare them… Renderman is a render engine that’s been stress tested, improved and worked on for about 23 years or so with the Pixar movies. While Cycles is just starting to do it’s first baby steps.

Try renderman with the pabellon barcelona scene, that’s where you’re going to see how powerful it really is, even with an alpha addon for blender:

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Also a 85MB Renderer (Cycles) is as good as a 500MB Renderer (Renderman), So Pixar should learn something from Blender

Don’t forget in that 85mb download also ships with a full modelling suite, game engine starter, scripting engine, particle system and rigging animation toolkit. hehe :cool:

All of you are cool

A lot of the really big pathtracers in general have optimizations designed for really big scenes at the expense of having less performance for smaller scenes. When I mean big, I mean the kind that can’t easily be done (if at all) on personal hardware.

Renderman regardless should be better at indoor scenes due to its denoiser and bidirectional rendering mode, but Cycles is starting to catch up with 2.75’s portals and the major improvement to that system right now in the review tracker.

Also true, really fast, displacement and light linking…among other features…in Renderman…

You can’t simply say Cycles is better with just a simple test like this. In my experience in productions, no renderers are better than one another, you just simply need to understand each one of them to be able to exploits their advantages to handle different projects nature

Err… this thread is a few years old and there’s no guarantee the guy who started the topic will read it.

Even though Cycles has gotten better with heavily detailed scenes, it will still struggle in areas such as scenes with massive numbers of large textures (it’s not uncommon for Renderman and Arnold to be used for scenes with hundreds, or even thousands of them).

does anyone have an update on this topic? Im really interested in both cycles and renderman and with the new major improvements to cycles im really interested to see how this topic continues

Yah think ur right :fire: