# RenderMan Reviews **Vendor:** Pixar **Category:** [3D Rendering Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/3d-rendering) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 26 ## About RenderMan RenderMan is a high performance renderer built to tackle the most complicated 3D imaginable. ## RenderMan Reviews ### 1. Pixar RenderMan is one of the best choices for cinematic rendering **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mats T. | Animator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 14, 2022 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Pixar's support team is excellent. RenderMan is still available as a perpetual license with optional maintenance. Bridge tools supplied for DCCs such as Blender, Houdini, Katana, and Maya. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Lack of offline documentation can be frustrating at times. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** RenderMan is a renderer. I wouldn't be able to do look development without it. ### 2. Render man For Hair and fur Lighting is the best one **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rishav R. | Lighting & Comp artist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Light presets and the controls over light attribute Is much better and easy than Arnold light presets **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** render time is high but although if you are looking for realistic and Crisp render compared to Arnold It gives way better Renders **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Shaders , Mix shaders and Procedural shading is easy and render man resources which they provide on the official community that help much more like they have Shader presets and HDRI ### 3. Great but hard to learn. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** The results are great. The shaders that pixar have compiled are clearly all very well done. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Alike many other pieces of software, Renderman does have quite a bit of a learning curve. This isn't really an avoidable problem but definitely the uptake of new users could probably have an easier induction period with regards to the learning tools. Though if you just need something quickly for a project, there are other options that might suit you better. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** RenderMan gives users a lot of freedom to adjust all the details. At the same time, users need to put in some effort to learn it. It'll take a longer time to set up a scene if I use Renderman but the outcome is worth it. Definitely worth it! Just have a look at inside out, damn. ### 4. A user perspective of the technical and artistic elements of Renderman **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Olly C. | Asset TD / Generalist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 24, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** The depth of control presented to the user, and the well documented documentation **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** The speed, some other renderers are faster, also the learning curve is steeper than other renderers **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Take the time to read through the documentation, not everything is as plug an play as other renderers **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** I do not currently use renderman at work, but at home i love the integration with houdini and katana ### 5. It’s just not Real_Time **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Quest M. | 3D Artist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** I’m a Unity\Unreal kind of guy. It’s what I gravitate to. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Autodesk is outdated and expensive. It is unrealistic to think that sustaining a freelance career as a young artist is even possible with Autodesk. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Learn some real-time stuff! It’s good for you! Renderman will be easy if you go real-time first! **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** It’s a good renderer. It’s fast. Capable. It’s good for experimenting. ### 6. Great for rendering in hight quality. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** ibrahim b. | qc character artist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Its great for metal rendering and since its from pixar there's no doubt of quality **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** It takes hell lot of time to render and cant be used in every system **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Have a good enough pc and spare time for rendering **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** It makes renders for metals very realistic and real life like and can also be used for stylised ### 7. The render options shows a wide range of quality options that are really impressive **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sherif G. | 3D Visualizer and Animator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** As a blender user i like the render to view port , and the light mixer panel **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** the material library need more options for ArchViz to be used as ready material **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** the GPU support helped me see the result of the rendering much faster specialty with the glass and the reflection effect ### 8. Best renderer with shader networks **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** kuldeep v. | Asset artist in Technicolor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 24, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Skin shader I think is best in class when we use renderman and some new tile planner algorithms **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Great for professional but not for beginners.if u add more student or user friendly stuff that would be great for everyone **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** The new planner algorithms better than older tripilaner is very usefull ### 9. RenderMan is best **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** vijay k. | Sr Lighting Artist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** It is very easy to use, clean interface and lots of material and HDRs are available at Renderman resources. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** There is nothing to dislike in Remderman **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Best Materials available and east to use **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast In Render time, easy to create complicated Material and shaders ### 10. Best Rendering Software for fast render **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nishant R. | Associate Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 05, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Interface is so easy to use and simple sober **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** There is nothing to dislike as of now it is the best **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Renderman gives immense control over lights and Pbr materials nd easy to use **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Render time optimisation and materials presers ### 11. Awesome renderer with cool tools **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Animation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Texture editing tools, color corrector, and Light sources. Also PxrSurface shader **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** IT is not integrated into Maya, It takes much more time for rendering, compares with other renders. maybe it works for big companies, but for the individual artist, I think it's not gonna work **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have got more realistic and "sweet" render. The Gi worked pretty well. In Maya Renderman was stable and there were no crashes or bugs. There is a nice community where you can ask and get your answers. ### 12. Rendering with awesomeness **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Animation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 29, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** I love the response of the shader, the way the lights looks and the immediate feedback in maya from the viewport. It’s pretty good during an environment lighting and shaders management. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** For personal project it tooks a lot of time to render pretty heavy scenes like trees scattering or places with a lot of geos on little machines (like redshift and vray) but this means only that the materials look better. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Think using it as a complete tool to reach complex levels of realism. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use it mainly when I need to get great result with glass and all the refractive/sub-surfaces materials. ### 13. One of the best Render engine I have used. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prudhvi Krishna M. | Lighting and Composting Artist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** GPU render is the best one and wser friendly Shaders. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** We can't see through selected lights with Renderman lights in Maya viewport. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving the best quality of output. ### 14. good for rendering animation projects, but slow **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Animation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2021 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** usability and built-in presets shayders and lights **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Speed, some other renders are faster, and still few good tutorials **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** good render software **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use it mainly when I need to get great result with glass and all the refractive/sub-surfaces materials. ### 15. Good but takes some time to master **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Design | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** The outcome is very amazing. The lights, reflection, and refraction are very well done. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Just like other software/plugin that does a lot, it takes some time to actually know this RenderMan well. If your career depends on this, awesome keep going! But f you just need something quickly for a random project, there are easier/quicker options out there. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Even though I'm not currently using this renderer but I think RenderMan is very good for 3D artists. Especially those who need a lot of freedom on manipulating all kinds of rendering options. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** RenderMan gives users a lot of freedom to adjust all the details. At the same time, users need to put in some effort to learn it. It'll take a longer time to set up a scene if I use Renderman but the outcome is worth it. ### 16. A very strong, straight forward renderer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** I love rendering with pxr materials and applying basic shaders. The output is always great **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** It is a pretty slow renderer compared to other renderers I've seen **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm not really solving any problems, but the benefits of renderman is that if I do run into problems there are community forums and discussions on problems. ### 17. Somewhat user friendly **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 31, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** High Poly render output using low poly model **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Not user friendly as other default renderer **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Decrease in poly count while rendering ### 18. Awesome render engine with huge capabilities. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Architecture & Planning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Render man is crazy fast and constantly improved. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** The learning curve is a bit hard to follow. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** If you want to be in the front of the industry train - render man is for you. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Short animations and simple projects for now. ### 19. Render man is really good and interactive software. I loved using it **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** The quality of render and timing, the render delivered was as per my expectations **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** nothing specific, it met my expectations **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** My render time and noise is better now ### 20. Great render engine for animation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simone G. | Rigger - Animatore - Animatore tecnico, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 28, 2019 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** It's powerful, the lights quality is astonishing, materials have many attributes that allow you to tweak every little aspect of the image. Render speed is good, the quality options are very detailed and let you adjust only the noisy components of the image. The denoiser is based on optix and can use gpu and is very fast, denoise quality is good. Excellent real time viewport integration with Maya. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Aov setup is a bit confusing, it looks simple but when denoise kicks in I never get a clue of what aovs will be rendered, sometimes all the aovs are saved on different files for both variance and denoised images but sometimes are not. Not the best for architectural, achieving photorealism is very difficult. Not the best engine if you use render farms. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Very good engine, excellent for cartoon animation. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's simple to set up basic scenes, lights work perfectly and let you understand the final quality of the renders. ### 21. I Don't have much experience with it. Yet. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Arts and Crafts | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2019 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Easy to access, lots of documentation, proved in production for years, and final quality **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Is not so popular as it should in smaller production teams/studios. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** I am considering start learning it for years. The art Challenges on the Renderman forums always push me to try it, and i always wish to start learning more about it. But is stills a wish. But i think that having Pixar as its heavier user/dev is already a huge reason to start using it since we have the result of their work using renderman as one of our biggest references of quality in the 3D world. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Nothing yet, since i just tried it a few times because i was curious about it. ### 22. Powerful, but sometimes unwieldy for independent users **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Broadcast Media | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2019 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Powerful, infinitely customizable. Documentation is much improved from previous versions. Rib archiving is quite powerful, especially in conjunction with python scripting. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Not as user friendly as competitors like V-ray or Arnold. Sometimes seems more suited to use by engineers as opposed to artists. Strange limitations on glass shader/output aovs, and sometimes simple things like creating shadow mattes seem to require a lot of jumping through hoops. Documentation, while thorough, can be overly technical and make it hard for the actual solution to an issue to be found. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Make sure you have the in-house support available to make RenderMan do what you need it to do. Also, if you are considering rendering many hdri-lit interior scenes, consider another renderer as Renderman is often quite slow compared to other renderers in these situations. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used RenderMan as the primary renderer on many episodic shows and feature productions. It handles massive amounts of geometry, and displacement rendering is also a strong point. ### 23. Difficult to navigate **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Architecture & Planning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2020 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** Nice quality renderings abd ability to post edit **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** User interface is very busy and hard to use **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** Export high quality renderings ### 24. Excellent product for all levels. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Laura S. | Student Animator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2019 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** It's very simple to use and adapt to from previous software. There is a lot of information available to make the transition as smooth as possible and plenty of support for it being taught at high education institutions. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** It can take a while to learn how to create and adapt the different techniques to create a range of looks, it is very easy to achieve cartoony aesthetic, but quite a bit more complex to create photorealism. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** The lighting is so simple to use and very quickly brings excellent results, the render times can also be optimised. ### 25. Simplified -Faster Visualization Tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2018 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** It is simple effective, efficient rendering. Its proven to have great photo-realistic results in movies such as Star Trek, Finding Dory, etc. For *students, using 3D for the first time or are trying to render models, animations for their student reel *non-CG artist professionals who think in terms of real life material properties * smaller companies trying to use a simpler renderer, *large companies with tech team, this is a great, resource and non-commercial license to learn to use. Visual development is much faster using the resolution technique, instead of going through passes visually which misleads impatient user to think they saw the final colors/values. Overall its much easier to use, while still having great control over the look. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** Still under developed, needing more interface. It requires a bit of R&D for smaller companies that don't have an in-studio tech team to help streamline workflow with this software. However it is more efficient in some ways than other software.... it just lacks some technical flexibility and commonality with the other renderers that makes CG professionals have to adjust to new lingo/terminology. Also from what my company has said, the support needs to be more robust to help make this software spread to more companies. On a technical note: Glass-Shader - is kind of strange in that the all-purpose seems more realistic than the Glass-shader, which has black refractions. Another thing is that we could use an option in the alpha channel to include a level of transparency for glass- like a checkbox- that just uses the thickness of the geometry per camera ray point. V-Ray has this in its renderers. The layered shader- similar to V-Ray's blend mtl, is almost great, except things are getting a little complex and not so accurate with the types of parameters involved. Is it possible to just layer existing types of shaders such as the Glass, Metal, Subsurface, (meshlight(BlackBox)) and PxrSurface shaders into the Layered Shader- Instead of just using layers with limited general functions? And like I mentioned above, Having a more easy to use Proxy loader like VRay is really important for medium to small companies. The simplicity and ease of use hits a plateau in that you really just have to live with the render, if something isn't quite right. But I trust that eventually more tools will be added as time goes on. I'm hoping the Pxr Surface becomes the main shader and improves with time since it matches the industry standard all-purpose shaders of other software. Maybe also allow for the roughness of refraction to be tweaked separately from the reflection. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** Like a lot of render engines, each one is slightly better at certain aspects and end up catering to certain products. Renderman has been around for decades, but has been used mostly in-house by Pixar for rendering top quality stylized feature animations. It performs beautifully and achieves pretty realistic results but overall will have a cartoonish, vibrant look to it. Getting absolutely photo-real is sometimes a miss -if you're going for something more sterile, architectural it's not the best use, since the render output leans toward renders with vibrancy, contrast, and a slightly plastic-y simplified finish on surfaces. However it is a very good render engine especially for its price. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to look develop a lot faster, use directional lights with falloff which helps fake better lighting in big outdoor/outerspace scenes. Renderman has fewer complex controls in the Render Settings and faster IPR which allows you to see the final color results even while its still resolving the resolution which beats VRay's older versions which would make you wait until it was 100% finished to know what the colors/values actually looked like. As a junior employee, its faster for me to try something with Renderman now, and not worry to much about increasing resolution parameters and complex technical settings in the Render Settings. Its also easier to get in the ball park in terms of the speed and simplicity of the render. ### 26. A complete experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cesar C. | Creative Director, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 03, 2016 **What do you like best about RenderMan?** All the presets it has are fabulous. It is fast and saves time. You don't have to configure many settings to get the desired result. **What do you dislike about RenderMan?** The lighting is a bit simple. It doesn't have many variations although it complements perfectly with other extra plugins. There aren't many resources and documentation online. **Recommendations to others considering RenderMan:** This tool can help you with scene setup times more quickly and easily. The problem is when you want to do something more complex, there isn't much documentation, although that's just a matter of time. **What problems is RenderMan solving and how is that benefiting you?** When very good results are required in short times, this tool is perfect. ## RenderMan Discussions - [What is RenderMan used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-renderman-used-for) - [Which are the best solution in terms of power for use it also for personal project instead using other simple render engine?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/32138-which-are-the-best-solution-in-terms-of-power-for-use-it-also-for-personal-project-instead-using-other-simple-render-engine) - 1 upvote - [What are you think about renderman, render speed](https://www.g2.com/discussions/36131-what-are-you-think-about-renderman-render-speed) - [View RenderMan pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/renderman/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-29+20%3A00%3A33+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e23eba78-20a0-444e-a682-217dadc16592&secure%5Btoken%5D=21673d304893fcfda825fc676af2ed555cb145390e7a788d69516e333e936223&format=llm_user) ## RenderMan Features **Generative AI** - AI Text-to-Image - AI Text-to-Video - AI Text-to-3D ## Top RenderMan Alternatives - [Blender](https://www.g2.com/products/blender/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (306 reviews) - [V-Ray](https://www.g2.com/products/v-ray/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (215 reviews) - [Redshift](https://www.g2.com/products/redshift/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (17 reviews)