RENDERMAN for OSX...Why isn't their one?

ThE OutsiDer

ThE OutsiDer

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There is one for NT, Linux and Irix but none for OS 10.
Why considering Steve owns Pixar and Pixar owns Renderman and Steve is iCEO of Apple.
 
OS X is still less than a year old. Relax, it will happen. With Lightwave, Maya, EI Universe and other high end 3D packages available for OS X, it's gonna happen. It should be a relatively easy port to do considering OS X's UNIX underpinnings...
 
There was a RenderMan for NeXT systems at one point, but you have to remember that as a workstation OS, what was OPENSTEP 4.2 (last sold by Apple in 1997) and has now become Mac OS X (released in 2001) was not an option for anyone to use for quite some time. The move to NT followed Alias|Wavefront's (SGI's) move of Maya to NT (the success of SGI's Windows/Intel based systems can be seen by their lack of ANY SGI produced Windows systems today).

As for the involvement of Jobs in all this, he has always run his companies in their own best interest. If supporting Apple hardware/software is in Pixar's best interest then they would release such a version. With Maya being released (and a free demo/education version available), RenderMan is starting to look like a good fit for the Mac.

We should remember that both Maya and RenderMan are several thousand dollars a piece, and that the platform of choice for these is still going to be Irix. No one else can produce the marriage of OpenGL (formerly IrisGL) with hardware support like SGI can. (This was the reason that Geoview was never ported to Windows but there was a NeXT and SGI version, that and PCs weren't consider real computers at the Geometry Center during the mid 90's. :D )
 
I wish Apple would just buy SGI already. They are a perfect fit for one another, and would help Apple tremendously.
 
Apple shouldn't buy SGI. They should just buy Alias|Wavefront. I think SGI spun them off. They wouldn't have much to gain buying the hardware division.
 
They would fit together, if you ask me. Though it will never happen. But Alias|Wavefront and Apple share the same attitude. Both are brave enough to "think different" in a business world where thinking different could mean you're going bankrupt, and both are kinda successful with it.
 
Yeah APPLE needs to buy the software divisions like ALIAS Wavefront or even Adobe.

We need to get the software out of the pc users hands and back into apples, like Final Cut pro is mac only, we need Photoshop, Illustrator and Maya mac only!

SGI and its MIPS cpu are excellent but are easily replaced by 2 dual 800 g4's.
 
I agree on stuff like Photoshop, Apple could gain users, but they wouldn't bring them enough money the make it profitable. Buying Alias|Wavefront...well...Maya on a Mac is nice, but far away from being what is needed in the movie sector. As the Lucasfilm guy said, they might be able to render "previews" of the final shot with the top-of-the-line Mac, but Apple doesn't offer the hardware to render the stuff you need for state-of-the-art movie FX. Even G4 clusters wouldn't do the trick compared to a SGI render farm. Their are no scalable solutions for this, not hotbooting of motherboards into different network domains (like it is done with render servers all the time), tiny RAM bus types, tiny HDD bus types, only 1,5 gig of RAM per Mac...that's far away from what you need in the movie business, regardless how big the cluster would be.
 
For starters, FF movie was meant to be rendered on 1000 pc's in a rendering farm.
There has been some clusterings of G4's that reached over a teraflop.

By Apple buying out Adobe more of these crappy pc design places would be forced to buy macs, thus largening the mac market significantly.

Lets face it guys the more mainstream graphics becomes the more we see cheapo's buying pc's for graphics with the "it will do for now" attitudes.
 
I have seen a Making-Of filmed in the Square Pictures HQ on Hawaii (IIRC). They had an impressive PC cluster, I wouldn't say it was 1000, but it could be, which they used as a render farm for finished scenes. The main work was done over SGI Domain Render Servers, and these beasts have abilities which you just can't achieve with standard clusters. Else, if a 1000 PC cluster would be enough to render such a movie, any company, Pixar, Disney, they would just buy HUGE PC clusters. They would be cheaper than a huge render server, but they don't since they need those features, you just don't get bandwiths of up to 700 GB/sec with PCs, but if you take a look at how many people worked at the same time in this office, creating and rendering the scenes, you will realize how big the traffic to these servers is.
PC-Cluster, as well as a Mac cluster, could be used, and sometimes are used, but they just don't reach the performance of a "true" render server.
 
That is not that surprising (and yes I heard about it back when Titanic came out), but render farms are headless number crunching systems. A good example would be Pixar who uses SGIs for their workstations but uses Suns for their final rendering. This was the case for every Pixar movie to date. And we shouldn't for get the Linux could have been running on almost any type of system and still been called a PC (including 4 processor Pentium Xeon or even Alpha systems). But in any case these were headless, GUI-less systems set to complete the long task of final rendering after a majority of the human/artistic work had been done on other systems. You could use Darwin on either Macs or PCs in the same way that Solaris (actually it was most likely just SunOS) and Linux were used in these other examples.
 
Which is why SGI still has at least the high market locked up tight. But looking at places like ILM where may people have SGIs and Macs on the same desk, all Apple would need to do is put out a relatively high end systems that could run Maya and RenderMan as good as either the O2 or the O2+ in order to displace some of those systems (though I don't see where Apple would gain much in a cost to profit ratio).

I still think that releasing a version of Maya and a free education version of Maya for Mac OS X helps SGI/Alias|Wavefront get there products into more peoples hands. Before this, a demo version of Maya was $200 and worked for only 2 weeks (a friend of mine wanted to use one of my systems to get a chance to see it in action).
 
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