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This service is made possible by Pixar’s cooperation with GreenButton, a software company specializing in cloud services for high performances. The service is said to have already been tested extensively in the beta version.
At present, RenderMan on Demand is said to reliably support only small and medium-sized projects; very large amounts of data are currently still said to present a challenge for the cloud. However, Pixar wants to change this over the next two years and soon make the cloud available for all project sizes. According to Pixar, the cloud service uses the same RIB files that are output by Pixar’s RenderMan Studio. RIB files generated from 3D applications are intended to be uploadable to RenderMan on Demand using the web interface.
RenderMan on Demand is currently available only for Windows, but support for Linux is intended to be added later this year. According to Pixar, project data is secured via personal access. The Pixar RenderMan team is said to have no access to the data or the rendered images.
The price for the RenderMan Cloud is made up of various factors such as the number of cores required, duration of use or storage capacity needed.
You can find detailed information here.
You can access RenderMan on Demand here.
