This is PhotoRealistic-RenderMan-review-ERRATA. in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 01-Oct-1991 11:26:34 From: wjs@milton.u.washington.edu (William Jon Shipley) Subject: PhotoRealistic RenderMan review -- ERRATA. There were a couple of smallish errors and possible sources of misunderstanding in my mini-review on PhotoRealistic RenderMan for the NeXT that I would like to clear up before I run out of breath. (-phew-) First off, the correct name of the package from Pixar is "Pixar's RenderMan Toolkit", which reflects that it isn't so much an App as it is a, well..., toolkit. The Toolkit contains two (yes 2!) implementations of the RenderMan language: a quick wireframe version ("vectrman") and the slower nice one ("PhotoRealistic Renderman"). It also contains the shader compiler, source code for the RIB library (but not for PRMan), tiff and texture file manipulation tools, and all the tutorials from _The_RenderMan_Companion_. This last thing is really cool, because the book has a number of neat images that you get to play around with. (This _almost_ makes up for the fact that these are the ONLY RIB files on the NeXT version, whereas the Mac version ships with tons of sample RIB files you get to use.) Secondly, the version currently available for the NeXT has about the same features available on all UNIX platforms; in fact one of the big bonuses of RenderMan is that you can render different frames of the same job on different platforms without worrying about file formats and byte orders and all that nonsense. One of the minuses I listed against PRMan for the NeXT is it doesn't have the nice user-interface programs the Mac version does. This apparently is because the NeXT was seen as a UNIX machine, not a PC, and so PRMan was ported and priced accordingly. Finally, I implied in my article that the NeXT version was wounded because of the lack of a functional license server. Well, it turns out this isn't such a big deal, because what I thought was possible on other platforms (automatically dividing up a single frame to be processed on multiple machines) isn't available on ANY platform right now. This misunderstanding was my fault, based on my reading the _Companion_ and guessing what some of the operators are for (there's a CropWindow operator that would work just spiffy for this). In fact, this kind of processing IS possible on the NeXT and other platforms, but it takes some hacking. (Pixar doesn't advertise this as a feature, in other words.) And, of course, if you want PRMan on multiple machines, you can just buy multiple licenses. As I understand it now, the only problem with the NeXT version is that with the license server you can buy say 5 licenses and have 5 copies of PRMan running on any 5 of the (say) 10 machines in your lab, whereas as things stand now you have to purchase a copy for each of 5 machines you want to run PRMan on and you can't run PRMan on the other 5. (You don't get floating licenses.) I think their licensing software is pretty bletcherous anyways, but I'm generally opposed to copy-protection, so there you are. -William Shipley The Omni Group
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.