Architosh Staff ([email protected])

7 Feb 2001

Mac OS X and Pixar's RenderMan

From time to time we occassionally catch a rumor or two and post that news here at Architosh. We don't like doing it too much because we don't like being wrong. When we cover advanced information—like the Maya on OS X rumor—we like to get it right...and in that case we did.

Pixar and Apple

Previously we wrote about both Maya and RenderMan. Our reasoning behind the existence of Maya for OS X came from both numerous inside reports, from those in the high-end movie studios (ILM, Disney, etc.), from some Maya users on Unix, and from programmers familiar with the technical job required.

But what of RenderMan? This rumor is far more difficult because RenderMan is Pixar's baby and Pixar is Jobs' baby. Get my drift? The amount of control these days going into the prevention of leaked information is reportedly at an all-time high at Apple and, presumably, Pixar as well.

But even with that said, we know that Pixar had a large interest in getting Maya on OS X because of "Maya's ability to server as an engine for their plug-ins." That much was said to us back in April of 2000. That must mean Pixar is re-writing or porting their RenderMan plugins for OS X support under Maya as a minimum. But what about rendering an entire movie on Mac OS X-based render farms? That's another matter altogether.

90 Calls

According to the Pixar site "RenderMan's RIB file interface consists of more than 90 calls that can invoke to transfer a scene description from your modeling or animation program to a rendering program." Essentially there are converters (plugins) which are available for programs like Maya, SoftImage or 3D Studio Max which allow you to bring your RIB file data right into RenderMan.

However, according to the latest information at Pixar, the RenderMan Toolkit 3.9 is only supported on SGI IRIX, Sun SPARC, DEC, RedHat Linux 5.0 (Intel) and Windows NT Service Pack 4.

The RenderMan Artist Tools 4.0—which includes MTOR 2.0 (the RenderMan Plugin for Maya), Slim, and Alfred 4.0 and Alfserver—are available only for SGI IRIX and Windows NT and 2000. So where's the mention of support for Maya on OS X?

Well, perhaps one shouldn't get too upset given that the Web page from where this information came is copyrighted 1999.

MTOR, Alfred and Alfserver for Mac OS X?

The real question is if Pixar is going to port some of RenderMan technology to Mac OS X or just the MTOR for Maya?