It seems that no one here noticed that a new pixie-version has been released some weeks ago
pixie is a renderman compliant render engine
What geek wrote that documentation. I downloaded the app, then looked at the documentation, then threw the app in the trash.
well… It isn’t so difficult if you are familiar with the renderman standard.
I compiled it and that nearly crashed my pc (linux here) because there are some files where gcc needs an awful amount of RAM which I don’t have. However, it worked fine in the end.
Then I tried to find some .rib testfiles which was not too easy but it worked. The renders are nice and IMHO pixie is pretty fast. It has good lighting calculation and many things were improved during the last months. The only problem I see is that there are no working scripts for exporting to pixie. Renderman does not get the attention it deserves…
The best features IMO:
- Programmable shading (using RenderMan Shading Language)
- High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
- High dynamic range input/output
- Scalable, multi-resolution raytracing using ray differentials
- motion blur
- Depth of field
- Level of detail (LOD)
- Reyes style rendering (very fast)
- Occlusion culling
- Network parallel rendering
- DSO shaders
- Global illumination
- multi-threaded rendering
A lot of that stuff (GI, motion blur, DoF and blurred reflections) looks like it would be really nice to use but the documentation made it not worth the hassel for me.
some files where gcc needs an awful amount of RAM
This is generally if you have any compiler flags set that do loop optimization of some sort like trying to unroll the loops. It tries to unroll loops too far and eats up memory.
the documentation made it not worth the hassel for me
The documentation is pretty staight forward. Are you sure you understand just what RenderMan is?
No I don’t, and the docs didn’t help.
Funny, I coincidentally downloaded and compiled pixie today, and now I find this thread. 
I’ve been playing with it most of the day. I’m now able to render a sphere, yay!
I also had very much memory demands while compiling, so much as I did get worried. But all was well also here (Kubuntu 6.06.1 LTS amd64, Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 GB RAM).
I don’t know anything about renderman, but, well, there’s always the net. Currently I’m working through an (old, but still good) intro to renderman (first link). Since it may be helpful to some people, I will post the links I found today.
http://www.fundza.com/rman_booklet/index.html
http://www.renderman.org/RMR/Books/index.html
http://www.dotcsw.com/links.html
http://accad.osu.edu/~smay/RManNotes/rmannotes.html
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/
http://www.fundza.com/
Sanne
thanks for the links 