Brick Map and Micropolygon Displacement as Renderman

[joconnell]

I'd agree with you. The rib file format and the shader language does seem to be very handy though - Admittedly I dont work for a facility that's big enough to take advantage of any of those features so it's not an issue. It's definitely a hinderance for me getting jobs in other visual effects facilities though since max can't integrate into big pipelines in this way.

[Morbid Angel]

well, for instance in our studio (image-engine) they are looking to switch renderers, and one of the suggestions was render man. However, no one knows render man well enough to be able to start a solid production of of it, and this is quite common. What needs to be done, is usually a studio will hire couple of render man programmers to help initialize rman and develop shaders, scripts etc, which is quite costy. Not to mention the price for licensing and etc. And chris will agree with me im sure, as i recall him explaining the pass procedure for movie stealth, where custom scripts had to be written to automate pass output.
Such situation precists not only in rman however. At present we are stuck with mental ray, and mental ray in maya suffers i think the most. Bad bad intergration...
At one point it took me 5 hours to output (not render) 5 passes. Because I had to do it manually. After that we have developed a dynamic shader library also via scripting to make such operation possible in 5 min not 5 hours. Where as in vray its all already there.
Vray is unmatched in such cases.