Nuke vs RenderMan
Nuke
foundry.comRenderMan
renderman.pixar.comSide by side
| Figure | Nuke | RenderMan |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | €34.67/mo | $20.83/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Vfx Tools | 7.1 (#15) | 7.8 (#11) |
| Spec score · Visual Effects Software | 7.1 (#27) | 7.8 (#17) |
Plans
RenderMan
- Non-Commercial RenderManFree
- Commercial maintenance$250 a year
- Commercial RenderMan$595, paid once
In their own words
RenderMan
RenderMan is Pixar’s production rendering software for visual effects and animation, available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its physically based tools include multi-bounce ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced subsurface scattering. RenderMan 27 adds XPU, a hybrid CPU/GPU renderer with multi-GPU support, and a machine-learning denoiser developed with Disney Research and trained on Disney and Pixar data. The Stylized Looks toolset supports approaches such as illustration and anime. Bridge tools connect it with Maya, Houdini, Solaris, Katana, and Blender, while supported standards include Alembic, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OSL, and USD.
RenderMan requires an AVX-capable processor. XPU and the OptiX denoiser also need an Nvidia Pascal-or-newer GPU; XPU requires at least 12 GB of VRAM. Non-commercial use is free but limited to the latest version and excludes Stylized Looks. Commercial licenses are $595 per licence once; maintenance is $250 a year.