Pixar Renderman, a bit of History.

CNBC created an interesting, if at times somewhat basic, video about Renderman:

How this small team at Pixar revolutionized computer graphics with software called 'RenderMan'

A nice look behind the scenes at PIXAR.

RenderMan

RenderMan 21 Non Commercial is finally out, so I tested it with Maya 2017. The image below took almost 8 minutes to render - that is not promising. RenderMan comes with many great material presents, setting up this scene for rendering was a breeze. Saved as openEXR and adjusted in Photoshop.

I rendered the same scene with the now default Arnold Renderer. It does not come with many materials and those have no presets. I used Batch render, which does work but places a watermark in the image. That is barely visible in this image, which was also rendered to openEXR and adjusted in Photoshop. Was a bit more involved to set up and took at least as long render