[Intuition]

Jeez, I didn't know you could render from Renderman that far back on a Mac of all places.

Wonder where you would build the models on a mac? It says copyright 1990. 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Super-Rare-Pixa...ctupt=true

[ghost180sx]

Renderman is now free for non-commercial use. See:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27677712

The 1990 version is the original release (for Mac anyways).
See: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ret...n.1741046/

It is easily available from macintosh garden:
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macrenderman-1

A book found in Google Books search from 1994 provides possible clues. It lists Renderman as Mac software for purchase and use, and on page ix of the contents lists the most commonly used mac modeling software in that time period:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=_-8Eewt...&q&f=false
"Mac 3D: Three Dimensional Modeling and Rendering on the Macintosh"
By Stuart Mealing, Intellect Books, Oxford, 1994

Because i've dabbled a bit, I'm willing to bet Infini-D and StratVision 3d were the most likely used items then. I also wonder if Pixar sold its Renderman for Mac after porting it from IRIX, but that's probably better answered by an SGI geek here

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I think I found the answer with a bit more digging. It seems this was not released for IRIX or any other OS than Mac OS originally. They were hunting hard for vendors and companies to sell the Renderman solution. Original it ran on Inmos' Transputer cpus. It seems the first solution was an add-on card putting Inmos Transputers in a Mac II, likely on a Nubus card.

Details in Info World Feb 27, 1989 Page 19 and 21:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=IToEAAA...&q&f=false

[ColanderCombo]

Because i've dabbled a bit, I'm willing to bet Infini-D and StratVision 3d were the most likely used items then. I also wonder if Pixar sold its Renderman for Mac after porting it from IRIX, but that's probably better answered by an SGI geek here

---

I think I found the answer with a bit more digging. It seems this was not released for IRIX or any other OS than Mac OS originally. They were hunting hard for vendors and companies to sell the Renderman solution. Original it ran on Inmos' Transputer cpus. It seems the first solution was an add-on card putting Inmos Transputers in a Mac II, likely on a Nubus card.

Photorealistic Renderman (prman) was developed on Unix and used internally by Pixar and ILM before being sold as a commercial product. It was available on a number of platforms; Sun, SGI, DEC, HP and others. There wasn't anything special about the IRIX port and it didn't make use of any of the graphics hardware. (While workstations were occasionally used for rendering, Pixar's own renderfarm was usually a pile of Sparcstations)

The transputer port referenced was done by transputer and I don't think it was ever sold as a product. Mac Renderman was a straight port, just like the other platforms. It was eventually used as the Mac rendering engine for 'Typestry', a 3D-logo creation program marketed throughout the 90's

A number of 3D apps on the mac had renderman bindings, but it obviously wasn't all that popular.

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Renderman is now free for non-commercial use. See:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27677712

This is true and super-keen, but note that the currently available version is significantly different than the prman you would have used in the 90's. Back then, prman's secret sauce was the REYES scanline rendering algorithm and a procedural shading language. The last version to support REYES and RSL was prman 20. Today it's all monte-carlo global illumination.

[ghost180sx]

Thanks ColanderCombo, all good info. I didn't know the new Renderman soft uses a different scan line algorithm but that's logical. Things have changed a lot since the early days of 3D and raytracing.

I was writing specifically to answer Irinikus' query on the use of Renderman on the Mac. It makes sense that it was used internally at Pixar before then as that is alluded to in the articles I posted. Yeah, it would be interesting to know if the 1988 product based on the Transputer ever made it to market. My guess is that it didn't and they released it as software only in 1990.

[Intuition]

Yeah sorry, forgot about this thread.

Yes, I was very aware of Renderman on all levels in the modern context.

I have worked professionally in visual effects in Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles area since 1995.

I did use Renderman for Maya from back in the Reyes days long before the current RIS engine which is far more efficient on modern multicore CPUS but I was far more interested in the old Reyes engine and the shortcuts its tech used to achieve great images and animation.

My post here was just a response to my own surprise that Renderman had a mac based product that far back and that the engine wasn't coupled with another software to create models which would then provide Renderman something to render.

I have some renderman software for Irix but have yet to get it to run with Maya. I did contact Pixar about getting a license for the older versions but they said they no longer can even serve those licenses as the new lic system wouldn't support the older one anymore.

[spiroyster]

The transputer port referenced was done by transputer and I don't think it was ever sold as a product.

Transputer was an microprocessor developepd by InMos in Bristol, UK (the building still sits empty just around the corner from where I work). It was scalable so would have lent itself rather well to this kind of workload (rendering being embarrassingly parallel). Incidentally, someone on nekochan found one of these boards a number of years ago although I don't know what or where it came from (I think they were a recycler), or if it was a commercially made product. The board was silkscreened "PIXAR", and the transputers on it were a dead give away. You might be able to find the post on the nekonomicon (https://gainos.org/~elf/sgi/nekonomicon/index.html). It was probably around 2015/14 ish maybe?

[KayBee]

I used MacRenderMan, Showplace, Glimpse and Typestry back in 1993. I bought them from Pixar when I really started getting interested in Computer Graphics. I bought a Quadra 840av with 32Mb of additional RAM to drive the software. It wasn’t particularly RAM hungry, but I was exploring other software at the time as well, “ElectricImage” which drank RAM. I remember a phone call where I was explaining to a sales person that I wanted to get the 32Mb installed (the 840 was tough to work on) and he kept thinking I was referring to the Hard Drive because machines don’t have that much RAM. Anyway, the Pixar software has a slight sense of fun integrated into its design and certainly the documentation. The docs were also of unmatched thoroughness, back then reading it was a master class in computer graphics for the time. Showplace is a model importing, positioning, shading and lighting tool. It comes with MacRenderMan and a networked version for distributed rendering. Pixar sold optional CDs with libraries of shaders that they called “Looks.” Glimpse was a GUI based tool that you use to customize the shaders. Great stuff.