PIXAR looking to release Renderman for G5 OSX in August

[peety]

there will first be a beta phase (i think at least about half a year) ... i think most of us are not customers yet, so it could take some time to see renderman in action

[JIII]

good news now all we need is that elusive Cineman Exporter than never seems to be made by anyone.

[Brent Turbo]

I seriously doubt there'll be much of an outcry for renderman on the Mac, considering the kind of software it is.

First, it runs from the command prompt, which will leave 99% of mac users (including myself) scratching their heads immediately. White text on black screens is totally 1982, and scares the crap out of me.

Second, there's only so much you can do with RAT as far as making shaders and lighting your scene is concerned. You've gotta be a C programmer, or have one on staff if you want complex shaders.

Third, it's $8,000.

[DELTAadmin]

There are Renderman compatible renderers, for example BMRT which is totally free.

[Other3DMaster]

So many post and effects houses here in Los Angeles use a mixture of machines and software. But one of the more common setups is Maya, Shake and Renderman on films. Now if Shake and Maya are on the Mac, it only makes sense to bring in Renderman. Over the last two years, even Pixar has put a lot of OS X machines into their pipeline. This totally makes sense. IT IS A PRO product. And seeing as how pros here in an industry town love macs, use them for huge portions of their work, they are going to love this possibility. Also keep in mind that most effects houses, including mine, have several programmers on staff for the very purpose of writing code for renderman and other apps. Every studio and house has a slew of in-house designed plugs and shaders. Here in LA, in the effects community, people were so pumped when Maya came to the Mac, and shake(various os flavors) is our(industry) defacto compositing software(now an apple product). So the statement that not many mac people would want this is totally in error. The programmers who are already on staff at all the effects houses and studio production shops are not going to care if they are programming for Renderman in Linux or Mac OS X flavor of unix. Buzz from my associates in the industry is that a full mac pipeline is getting closer and closer. And seeing as how Cinema 4D is getting more and more adoption in the various effects houses, then a RIB exporter and Renderman package make total sense.

Steve Jobs had our industry and our deep pockets(sorry) in mind when bringing things such as Shake to the Mac, so in line with that, Renderman on the Mac is just logical. This is about pros working on big money projects, projects which Macs can totally handle now from beginning to end. G5 towers are going to give everyone a run for their money. And pros in the film/video industry are pumped. Plus, as far as command lines go, part of the great thing about the Unix underpinnings of OS X was that it brought whole new groups of programmers into our community. And those unix guys love command lines, and don't mind working on them, whether mac or other. I know our coders are happy.

And as far as $8000, in this industry that is a drop in the bucket. Scripts go for six figures, directors and actors get millions, and an average studio film costs around 45mil. Renderman, Shake, etc. are about high-end pros, and that is what Apple is going after with the G5 and its pro film(Shake, FCP4, etc). But Cinema 4D is a part of that high-end. This is good, and pro-mac people WILL want this....

One of my associates has already sent in his request for the beta program. He is a Renderman guru, and loves macs. So he loves the possibility of this marriage.

[ThirdEye]

If Softimage will port XSI on MAC OS then we'll have Mental Ray on OSX too. The competion is starting now, folks.

[LucentDreams]

if maya 5 has mray, shouldn't htye have or already be porting it over to mac ?

[Brent Turbo]

Mental Ray for Maya OS X is available for Maya 4.5, and included with Maya 5.0. The Mental Ray standalone renderer 3.2 is not available for the Mac. The standalone is necessary for batch rendering, or rendering exported .mi files. Otherwise, you're just using the built-in mental ray, and you've gotta do a "save image" after each frame renders out. AFAIK, there are no plans to port Mental Ray standalone to the Mac.

[derwolpertinger]

really great news here!!:buttrock: well, i am sure in that case someone is going to develop a cineman exporter for sure. although i won't be able to be buy rm i think these are just great news for the mac community in general.

[LucentDreams]

you guys have been missing some threads recently, There is a rib exporter for C4D in development

[the vapor]

Is there any reason why Renderman doesn't have a GUI? I didn't know this until I read it here, I just wonder why such a high-end app would rely on a command line?

If it does get ported to the Mac I'd fully expect it to have a GUI and a heavily discounted price to lure more pro level users to the platform. These are exciting times to follow Apple, and I hope they can maintain the wave that they're currently on.

[Per-Anders]

renderman is just a render engine. think of it like a printer. all info you send to a printer gets broken down into either ascii text commands as with postscript, or raw data that the printer then interprets. with renderman it's form of postscript is RIB. but in fact all render engines work somewht like this. your scene gets broken down into it's component parts and the data is sent to the render engine, usually in ascii text script form where the engine then takes control and produces the render.

the thing about renderman is that they also allow you to type this stuff in directly if you wish. mostly what happens with it (or mray, or any other engine) is that there's a bridge between your 3d software and the render engine, so once set up, all you have to do is hit the render button and it's transparent to you. setting up the bridge can sometimes be a problem especially if you're not particually techical.

oh and on a side note, Brent, love the avatar hehe :) :buttrock:

[Brent Turbo]

What also sucks about the Mac 3d situation (which is rapidly changing, by the way, just pick up any 3d magazine and look at all the OS X versions coming out) is that Maya Unlimited is not available, nor does it appear to be in the works. That's a bummer because Maya Cloth is just amazing in every respect, and the fluid dynamics are no slouch either. Both are very useful, and I'm anxious to somehow (FBX seems to be the only hope) use these in conjunction with Cinema.

mdmd_sadie: narcissist first, artist second!

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