Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!texbell!letni!merch!spudge!johnm
From: johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: RenderMan
Summary: The Amiga users at Pixar are wimps
Keywords: Pixar, RenderMan
Message-ID: <17997@spudge.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 90 14:19:16 GMT
References: <7850@lynx.UUCP>
Reply-To: johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch)
Distribution: na
Organization: Friends of Guru Bob
Lines: 32

In article <7850@lynx.UUCP> vik@lynx.UUCP (Vikram Sohal) writes:
>I read somewhere that Pixar has ported their RenderMan Computer Animation
>package to work on systems other than their own. Any chance there this has
>been ported to the Amiga? If not, which systems is it available on? 

It has been ported to the Apple Macinto$h for one.  They sell a back end that
you use with any one of several 3D editors to produce files which you can feed
to their program for rendering.  I don't think it will act as a general
programming platform though so you can't actually write C programs which
interface with it (take this sentence with salt, it is only an impression).

I took the opportunity to ask a guy in the Pixar booth at Siggraph last year
about an Amiga port and he responded that some of the people at Pixar had
Amigas so there had been some talk about it but there wasn't one planned.
He then went on to explain to me (like I was some kind of idiot) that
RenderMan tended to be very computationally intensive ("no, kidding") and he
wasn't sure how well the Amiga would do as a platform!  This was in a booth
where they had RenderMan running on that trained ape of a computer, the 
IBM PC AT and they had the RenderMan demo (which renders a pencil with
attributes you select) running on the Mac II.

I didn't take the moron by the collar and shake him but I actively 
considered it.  I did however explain that anything the Mac II could do I
could do much better on my machine at home.

>I saw a book in my local computer bookstore describing how to use RenderMan
>as well as a description of its interface. I'm not sure exactly, but I 
>think the book is called the "The RenderMan Companion".

Yup, good book.  Considerably better than Pixar's own RenderMan specification.

John Munsch		| A graphics person trapped doing Lan work. :-<