In Spring 2021 Blender is to get the official new Pixar renderer, RenderMan 24. The cutting-edge RenderMan 24 will include “Stylized Looks”, on which all will be revealed in a webinar this evening. Although you can get a sneak-peek here, from which the screenshot below is taken…
That looks horrible, frankly. Though the painterly simplification brushes look a bit better…
But apparently the “Stylized Looks” will offer…
“a tool for any type of look creation, from photorealistic images to any other artistic genre, from comics to anime, from illustration to watercolor … toon shading to brush stroke effects … or anything you can imagine. … from conventional cartoon shading to hatching or brush strokes, with the hatching reacting to emulated light effects, and supports custom AOVs and display filters. … work usually done in comp to stylise an image can now be performed directly during rendering.”
And before you get too excited by that blurb… note that it will only be available to users of the commercial edition of the software. Not in the “free non-commercial edition”. Aww. Thus it’s going to be “production studios only” rather than for hobbyists, due to the fairly hefty $600 price tag for RenderMan 24.
Ah well… so there’ll still be a place for Blender’s forthcoming BEER NPR plugin. And, most likely, for Poser 12.