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Toy Story 4 © Disney/Pixar
In a perfect world, artists and technicians would be just psychic enough to never need help, but in reality we could all use some support time to time. This document will help you decide the best source for your support and how to make the most of it.
Who gets support?
Users in the non-commercial forum rely on community support. While RenderMan support and engineers may visit the forum to help out as part of the RenderMan community, support is not provided to non-commercial license holders.
Commercial users of RenderMan with paid maintenance have access to the commercial support forums. Site licenses and special projects may have their own forum to discuss NDA-protected content. We operate in a secure environment with air gapped workstations for sensitive materials.
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We may also ask for more files or data as we progress. The ticket will be put on wait until we hear back from you. You may have been given this ticket number or you may request it. This is so you can reference the problem in our system later if you need to. However, the forum will track the issue with the thread itself, so having the ticket is a convenience for you later should you need to revisit the problem in the future.
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Please don't delay in seeking help for persistent problems! While we expect you will troubleshoot on your own (maybe 15 minutes of massaging a scene solves it instead of 4 days of forum exploration) some issues may be too complex for you to solve and we have no interest in seeing users suffer. Internally you should triage your issues and decide what it most important and what you cannot solve on your own. Even if you suspect user error but cannot verify it, we may be able to help you determine the cause. In the event it is user error, maybe we can clarify the correct workflow in the documentation or add safeguards to the software to avoid this in the future.
How Can I Check What's Been Fixed or Changed?
Maybe you're a version or two behind and want to see if something you're struggling with was addressed recently, head on over to the release notes and see!
Support That Matters
At the end of each day we hope you can go home on time and look forward to another day of creating, solving artistic challenges, and knowing the tools are there to support you and your goals. We're excited to see the amazing work you produce using RenderMan and the awards and accolades our customers have earned over the last 30 years inspires us to continue to do more–with our customers.
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Another friend has his seating area upstiarsupstairs, can this deliver beer up a flight of steps?
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Oh, well...ok that gets kind of complicated doesn't it? What's happened is you've gone from a very specific pipeline problem (your fridge to your couch) to needing a general solution (whatever beverage to whatever area in houses of different sizes and arrangements). This requires much more research and development to come up with a useful and robust solution to as many scenarios as you can imagine! So many options, so many details, so many requests! This may give you a bit of insight into the world of software development. If you're an artist you may be able to use this example to understand how our partnership can help provide the best overall solutions for artists everywhere and the complexity involved. But we love the challenge!