Mercenaries Engineering releases Guerilla Render
Originally posted on 18 November. Scroll down for updates.
French developer Mercenaries Engineering has announced that Guerilla Render, its production renderer for animation and visual effects work, will be released commercially on 4 December.
The software a proven record in VFX work, having been used at Prime Focus on movies like Total Recall.
Combined Reyes rendering and unbiased path tracing
Guerilla Render is intended to strike a balance between realism of output and set-up time, including both a Reyes renderer and an unbiased path tracer. Lights and shaders are assigned via a nodal render graph.
The website currently includes only a basic feature list for the software, but there are several points of interest to larger studios, including “nearly free stereo rendering”, and support for other common pipeline software, including RenderMan, Massive and Naiad.
Mercenaries Engineering isn’t currently listing a price for the product, but those that want to try before they buy will be able to download one free licence when Guerilla Render is released, and use it on commercial jobs.
Guerilla Render runs on 64-bit Windows and Linux, and requires an Nvidia graphics card.
Updated 11 December: Guerilla Render has now officially been released.
The online feature list has been fleshed out considerably: as well as more detail about the rendering toolset itself, there are some interesting notes about pipeline integration (built-in Maya exporter; support for Alembic, and Mari’s UDIM texturing workflow; all internal components open and written in RenderMan Shading Language; RenderMan’s RIB format used to send jobs to a render farm).
The page also emphasises Guerilla Render’s readiness for large production jobs, stating that it can “render hundreds of output images at the same time and raytrace hundreds of millions of polygons or curves” and multiply thousands of guide curves to millions of hairs at render time, using its built-in hair/fur procedural.
Mercenaries Engineering has also posted a video (above) showing look development workflow from Maya to Guerilla Render, which gives a feel for its capabilities.
Updated 13 December: The recommended prices for Guerilla Render are €2,000 (around $2,750) per artist workstation licence, and €700 (around $960) per render node, including one year’s maintenance.
That doesn’t include volume discounts: Mercenaries Engineering tells us that since the free licence is intended as a ‘starving artist’ scheme, if anyone taking advantage of it wants to buy more seats of the software, they will agree a custom price.
Read more about Guerilla Render on the Mercenaries Engineering website