Ahhh Man Love it I am going to learn it asap.
RenderMan for Blender 24.2
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Are there already plans for a macOS Metal version of Renderman?
Not as far as I know. RenderMan 24 requires an x86-64 processor with the AVX instruction set extensions and 4GB RAM. XPU requires a commercial RenderMan license and an nVidia (CUDA) GPU with at least 11GB VRAM. Running RenderMan under macOS Big Sur or later is not supported but might work if running on Intel hardware.
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Thanks for the info.
RenderMan for Blender 24.3
6 Likes
rendermans features are so damn deep. I’ve used most renders (arnold, redshift, octane, cycles, corona), i find renderman to be the most difficult to just understand at a glance, so many integrators and a bazillion settings 
And pixar uses different naming conventions on some stuff which is a bit confusing.
fun to poke around though!
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Pixar developer Sarah Forcier said the following on the RenderMan Support Forums:
“This isn’t for Blender, in particular, I was just curious if there were any plans in the works for native builds for RenderMan for Apple silicon (ARM).
Thanks!
-Hollister”
“Hi Hollister,
Support for Apple M1 is on our to-do list but not in the near term.
Cheers,
Sarah”
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Hopefully that might change once Apple releases their Mac Pro’s (assuming they provide a compelling enterprise class workstation speed).
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The upcoming Mac Pros will still be Intel-based as far as I know:
Thanks for letting us know. I’ve got the impression that Pixar is not very interested in macOS anymore, despite the fact that Steve Jobs made them big. 
Perhaps, but the hopefully soon to be released 27 inch pro-level iMac will most probably come with the fastest Apple Silicon chipset so far.
I don’t think so. I feel that it’s possible that up to last year Apple considered upgrading the Intel Mac Pro lineup but obviously they changed their minds or else they would have already released them (perhaps they got turned off by Intel’s weird anti-Apple campaign). At this point I find it incredibly unlikely that Apple will release anything that’s not ARM-based, they are far too committed to go backwards.
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Steve Jobs’ investment in Pixar helped them in the beginning surely but I don’t know how many RenderMan licenses are sold on each platform (Linux, macOS, or Windows). I suspect most render farms running RenderMan are GNU/Linux-based on x86-64 hardware.
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I think so too. It’d be idiosyncratic to upgrade every piece of hardware to Apple Silicon except the Mac Pro. It might be the last in line to be upgraded though, because of the speed that’s needed.
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In my opinion, a Mac Pro workstation would still need a discrete GPU. If nVidia buys ARM Holdings from Softbank and Apple transitions all products to ARM-based processors, I hope nVidia will eventually support Apple’s Metal API. An ARM64-based CPU and an nVidia RTX GPU would be an interesting combination.
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Personally I hope that NVIDIA does not buy ARM, otherwise everything will revolve around NVIDIA, already now you can no longer do anything without an NVIDIA graphics card, everything seems to revolve around NVIDIA, I don’t think this is good for end user. Has already monopolized the world of graphics, eliminating competitors over the years, I prefer more ARM manufacturers
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Apparently nVidia will abandon the ARM-deal:
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You’re invited to join this ongoing lively discussion about Apple Silicon developments:
Has anyone used Renderman for Blender for a somewhat heavy professional project?