Minimum System Requirements

The following operating systems are supported for this release. RenderMan may operate outside of this requirement, but it may be unstable and is not supported:

• Linux CentOS  6 and higher

RenderMan is designed to efficiently scale across many CPU cores, so while the above is a minimum requirement, systems with multiple processors will see the best performance.

Pixar's RenderMan software is delivered as: 

• RenderMan-Installer-version-linuxflavor.rpm - The RenderMan rendering toolkit.

The flavor string includes the common distribution, e.g. RHEL6, the gcc/icc versions, and the microprocessor instruction set. Putting them all together provides, for example, a Linux CentOS package named RenderMan-Installer-21.0_1590950-linuxRHEL6_gcc44icc150.x86_64.rpm.

GUI-based Installation

Although RPM packages are typically installed via command line, some Linux distributions have GUI-based package managers, like gnomerpm. Some distributions will also allow for double-clicking the RPM file in a directory browser, which will invoke RPM with default arguments. You can try this with your Linux-based system. Should it not begin the installation on its own (because you do not have the necessary components to double click an .rpm) then you may begin the process using the steps below.

rpm -ivh RenderMan-Installer-21.0_1590950-linuxRHEL6_gcc44icc150.x86_64.rpm

If you have already unpacked the .rpm, you can then run the following command to begin the GUI-based installer:

sudo /opt/pixar/RenderMan-Installer/bin/RenderManInstaller

Command Line Installation

The software can also be installed via command line using a terminal window. You must obtain the .pkg files using your forum login.

> installer -pkg RenderManProServer-version-linuxflavor.pkg -target /

> installer -pkg RenderManProServer-Installer-21.0_1590950-linuxRHEL6_gcc44icc150.x86_64.pkg -target /

Installing to a drive other than /

To install the packages to a different drive, the / target of the default path can be replaced. For example, to install to a second disk/Volumes/HD2/, from a root shell type:

> installer -pkg RenderManProServer-21.0_1590950-linuxRHEL6_gcc44icc150.x86_64.pkg -target /Volumes/HD2

Setting Up the User's Environment

Environment Variables

There are several environment variables that users should set. These can be added to your .cshrc, .tcshrc (or other startup) file, like so:

setenv RMANTREE /opt/pixar/RenderManProServer-21.0

or, if you are using bash:

export RMANTREE=/opt/pixar/RenderManProServer-21.0

The following environment variables are recommended:

• RMANTREE - establishes the location of your PRMan distribution.
• RMANFB - establishes your framebuffer display program.
• path - establishes the searchpath for the execution of programs, this probably already exists, so it is just a matter of adding $RMANTREE/bin to your path.
• RDIR - specifies a directory where additional configuration files can be found, e.g. a site-specific rendermn.ini file.

RenderMan for Maya users should consult the RenderMan for Maya (RfM) documentation for more information about RfM-specific environment variables.

RenderMan for Katana users should consult the RenderMan for Katana (RfK) documentation for more information about RfK-specific environment variables.

Systems administrators may also choose to use the PIXAR_LICENSE_FILE variable to point to their software license, in lieu of using the defaults, or may point to an arbitrary location for their license via the /licenseserver preference in their own custom, site-specific .inifiles, and absolutely should not add that preference to a factory-shipped .ini.