Somehow I read your comment as V-Ray is not among them as being last-gen. I remember that years ago there was a lot of buzz regarding Arnold (and it was justified to some extent AFAIR, at least judging by opinions of pleased 3D crowd), but maybe it's last-gen too now? Many years ago there was Brazil, but quick googling shows it's only for Rhino now? I haven't heard about Redshift till now, though.

Pixar didn't license any particular special GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015; they're just using OptiX and CUDA like everyone else. Pixar released initial GPU support in RenderMan this year, but currently XPU only supports a subset of the full RenderMan functionality. Before that, the only GPU ray tracing they were using internally was on an extremely limited basis for early lookdev workflows. Final lookdev and all of lighting continues to be CPU-only. I likely know more about this particular usage than you do because... I worked on the early internal GPU ray tracing for lookdev stuff at Pixar.

Autodesk Arnold has initial GPU support, but it was only added in the past few years. Most studio usage limits Arnold GPU usage to lookdev; most desktop workflows for iterating continue to be CPU because again... not enough memory on GPUs. SPI Arnold has no GPU support at all. Yes, there are two Arnolds out there.

After Effects is not really used for high-end 3D rendering? Why is it on your list? Did you just do a Google search for "GPU renderer" and throw what you found into a list without actually understanding what each thing is?

V-Ray has had extensive GPU support for many years now, and it probably leading the pack among usage in film/vfx/etc houses. However, most film/vfx/etc places use V-Ray CPU for both iterating on the desktop and for final frames, due to GPUs not having enough memory. V-Ray GPU has seen wide adoption in the archviz world though.

Gazebo is an OpenGL viewer, used in DCC viewports. It's not even remotely close to a final frame renderer. Manuka does not have GPU support whatsoever; the Manuka development team literally published an entire ACM TOG paper on this topic which I guess you haven't checked.

I'm not entirely sure how you put your list together; everything on here is either out of date, misunderstood, or just flat out wrong, and all in ways that are immediately apparent to those of us who actually work in this industry.

- Sony Pictures Imageworks open sourced Open Shading Language, Field3D, Alembic and OpenColorIO.

- Pixar opensourced OpenSubDiv

- Disney opensourced Ptex, BRDF Explorer, SeExpr and Partio

- Dreamworks open sourced OpenVDB

I wouldn't be too suprised if we would see an open source renderer within the next 10 years, especially if SPI is going to replace their in-house version of the Arnold renderer, as open source software has been extremely successful for SPI.

After Effects doesn't really belong on this list?

Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look.

Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for very little benefit, it's pure CPU now and has been for > 7 years).

Until the GPU renderers can run custom shaders (rather than just the stock shaders the renderers ship with), i.e. OSL supports full GPU support, high end VFX facilities aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

Smaller facilities which are happy using the stock shaders are though.

Renderman was hard to learn but the promise was here: It was fast. With time the REYES approach starts to show its age (need a lot of preparation work) bad raytrace performances due to “combining” REYES and ray tracing in the same engine, etc. forcing it to fall back in the same competition line (and price) than it's competitors. Full feature animation movie is not the only market.

For example Vray for Maya (used on Tron Legacy) was a good combination between ease of use inside Maya and the technical director features (features that need some dedication and knowledge, like python pre execution directly on render scene) make it a joy to use.

I wish them the best of luck - and I love some of Autodesk's tools - but I don't immediately see why I'd choose this over Unity or Unreal.

I hope they integrate the renderer into Motionbuilder, though. In 2015, the quality of render it's possible to pull from that tool is just embarassing.

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-state-of-rendering/

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-state-of-rendering-part-...

What's interesting is how far Pixar's PRMan has fallen within 2-3 years, despite PRMan 19 (current in alpha) going to provide BDPT with vertex connection and merging (state of the art lighting equation).

The problem is, despite providing the above, they're still getting some of the basics wrong, and Geometric lights still aren't being sampled correctly, in addition to:

Even with fully raytraced (i.e. no REYES) setups in it, its instancing support is still fairly pathetic, and its texture paging support is shockingly bad, even with Pixar-proprietary pixar format for images.

Once by far the dominant renderer in VFX, Arnold has come along and knocked PRMan off its perch (although Arnold still has a few issues as well).