I don't know of any companies still using PRman apart from Pixar but they will see :) I used to use PRman back in 2003 but Arnold is what everyone has been using for years thanks to Marcos Fajardo. On a major film project recently the team found that just chucking the high poly object to render (24 million polys with 1.7…
This is true. Most big companies still use PRman/Renderman, nothing else can handle hair and motion blur quite like it. Pointclouds and brickmaps are still invaluable for very dense scenes. At the same time, a lot of them are starting to adopt Arnold into their pipelines..but rarely will you find a big studio (Digic would…
We've actually gone from Renderman with a very small crew, through Renderman and Mental Ray for AO/RO passes, to Mental Ray on its own; until we've ended up with Arnold, starting on the Assassin's Creed 2 Brotherhood trailer in early 2010. The main reason is that it's far more simple and quick to set up, more robust, and…
I don't know where your information is coming from, but it's not entirely true. Just about every one of the big major visual effects companies uses PRman, and have done for years. Every year Pixar have a PRman usergroup at Siggraph and/or in London and it's rammed full of people. It's true that some people are using Arnold…
I know it’s hard to pin down a single best practice method for creating models for baking but I was wondering how you like to have your wireframes before taking them to Zbrush, Mudbox, Mari and then exporting them to Xnormal, Maya – Turtle, Floating Geometry baking or whatever it is you use. For example in film we create…