New Native Renderer

[Anonymous]

Maya desperately needs its own native render engine, a new powerful one.

Arnold is not native, and it requires the user to buy the full feature set in order to be able to render animations (batch render, distributed render and so forth).

Maya users should not be forced to pay for third party renderers (V-Ray, Arnold, RenderMan... You name it), although some of them exist in their free version (well, only RenderMan does, and it's the better integrated one).

As it stands Maya is an incomplete package out of the box (at least for seasoned professionals, not so much for beginners and students, in their cases it's alright).

Modo, Cinema 4D, Houdini, LightWave, Blender and others, all have their own native renderer that makes these products independent from the third party plugins purchase and, as a consequence, a more complete packages overall.

So, my "idea"/ wish is to have a brand new Maya Native Renderer, modern, with all the most popular features (path tracing, GI, AI Denoiser...) and with the ability to choose between different render modes: CPU, GPU and Hybrid (CPU + GPU).

Now, this would be a killer feature!

[userX4542]

I agree, just make Arnold free for Maya. As for GPU and CPU, I know this is something they've been working on for a long time...

[dgorsman]

Creating (and *maintaining*) a "new" renderer is a huge undertaking.  I'm not certain those who are using the third-party renderers like Arnold, Vray, etc. would be comfortable with a large chunk of the development budget being redirected to something which may not see common use.  That's one of the major factors of moving more towards a plug-in type rendering environment - users are now free(er) to use whatever supported renderer they want.

Is not Arnold included with Maya?  Yes, you need to purchase separate licensing for running headless in a render farm type situation but that's not what's being discussed.

[Anonymous]

No, it's not a huge undertaking nor it would be taking a large chunk of the budget.

Smaller companies than Autodesk have their own engine, it's a fact, not my opinion.

In fact having a proprietary render engine is WAY LESS expensive than having to deal with third party plugins compatibility.

Also, Arnold needs to be paid even for just batch rendering, not only "render farm type situation". This is another fact.

[eXSst]

Yes for 190$/month it should have all the professional features. I would even go as far as making the current Maya/limited Arnold a noncommercial version with Photoshop like pricing. Even if it would require increasing Arnold rental prices.

[tj.galda]

Hi gang,

Arnold is an amazing renderer that has been used on a number of projects to great succsess.  It's fast and super high quality.  Check out some of the examples here:

https://www.solidangle.com/gallery/

If you want to render with Arnold, it comes with Maya and you can render sequences without watermarks from within Maya.  Here's some more information:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Batch-Ren...

[Anonymous]

tj.galda

Those pieces of information are things that I already kew, as you can clearly tell from my very first comment.

I know Arnold very well and I know what is capable of.

By the way, could you tell me where did I complain about its quality? Because I don't think I have.

Rendering sequences means absolutely nothing when your need is distributed rendering, using a renderfarm, or even as simple as batch rendering, which means not having to keep Maya open, only it's batchrender process (or rendering from the command line).

Batch rendering, and distributed rendering are no longer native in Maya as a matter of fact.

Changinf the status of this thread to archived makes no sense at all. It only means that Autodesk is not willing to fix this situation, hence forcing the user (freelance or company, it does not matter) to spend money on top of the software, something that competitor packages don't do.

A native renderer is the basics and should be there.

Very disappointed from this outcome.

[info]

Agreed with msanna1 for 100%