PrmanRender

PrmanRender is a render node that works together with Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan® Pro Server software to give you an even better quality render result. PrmanRender is an alternative to Nuke’s ScanlineRender with additional features for rendering 3D scenes.

Setting Up RenderMan Pro Server and PrmanRender

In order to use the PrmanRender node, you need to have Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan Pro Server 20, or earlier, installed and licensed on your machine (for brevity, we call it RenderMan from now on). To do this:

1.

If you're using Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or above, make sure X11 is installed on your system. Unlike previous versions of the operating system, 10.8 and above do not have X11 installed by default. For more information, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293.

2.

Follow the instructions in the RenderMan installation guide to get RenderMan working on your machine. This is in most cases enough to get you going with using both RenderMan and the PrmanRender node in Nuke. Note that RenderMan specifically needs two environment variables set in order to work with Nuke:

• RMANTREE - This needs to point to the location of your RenderMan distribution.

• Depending on which operating system you’re using either DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (on Mac), LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on Linux) or PATH (on Windows). This environment variable needs to point to "%RMANTREE%/lib". For more information on setting environment variables, see Environment Variables.

3.

To make sure your PrmanRender node is working in Nuke, start the application from the terminal (for more information, see the Installation and Licensing chapter).

4.

Create a PrmanRender node in Nuke (3D > RenderMan > PrmanRender) and connect it to your nodes. You can try the following combination of nodes as a test: Checkerboard > Cube > PrmanRender > Viewer.