Pixar released yesterday a non-commercial RenderMan version. They provide some information about it on their web site. Most of the people will use it from within Maya or Katana, but I want to provide some basic information about the stand alone renderer.

I installed it on OS X, but Linux or Windows versions should work in a similar way. First you should set an environment variable called $RMANTREE:

setenv RMANTREE /Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-19.0

The syntax above is for tcsh, for bash use the following:

export RMANTREE=/Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-19.0

To render our first picture we will go directly into a subfolder and render one of the example RIB files coming with the free version:

cd $RMANTREE/lib/examples/RIS/scenes/pattern/osl
$RMANTREE/bin/prman -progress -d tiff oslball.rib

RIB stands for the __R__enderMan __I__nterface __B__ytestream Protocol.

The resulting 512x512 image will be called oslball.tif as described in the RIB file:

Display "oslball.tif" "tiff" "rgba"
Format 512 512 1

It should look similar to the image below:

The patterns were generated via the OSL shading language and some examples (e.g. oak.osl) can be found in the shaders subfolder.

I will update my multi-exporter soon to support the non-commercial RenderMan version from Pixar and provide RIB files in the download section.