Here I’ll quickly show how to set up RenderMan and Katana in a no CentOS distribution. In my case, Ubuntu 20.04. Remember, these are just my personal notes.

If you, like me, is just starting to get your hands on those softwares, here are some usefull links:

RenderMan⌗

You can download a non-commercial version of RenderMan here. You will get an .rpm file like this:

RenderMan-InstallerNCR-24.3.0_2208291-linuxRHEL7_gcc63icc190.x86_64.rpm

The versions in the filename may vary depending on your linux distribution and the version of RenderMan you download. Anyways, if you try to install it right away it will probably NOT work. That is because RenderMan is originaly built for the CentOS linux distribution, and it uses some specific libs your system does not have.

You will need to add the missing files to the rpm package. First, extract the contents of the rpm package and dive into the extracted tree of directories. We will be interested in the Qt lib folder,

/opt/pixar/RenderMan-Installer-ncr-24.3/lib/3rdparty/Qt-5.12.6/lib

that is where we will put the missing lib files.

In my case I didn’t have libicu. You can download the binaries here (scroll down to Download section, and get the binary package link). It is also a rpm file

libicu-50.2-4.el7_7.x86_64.rpm

Extract the contents and copy all libraries (*.so), located in the extracted folders usr/lib64, into the Qt lib folder I mentioned earlier.

That should do. In order to install RenderMan you don’t need to pack everything back to a rpm file. You can just run (with sudo)

sudo ./opt/pixar/RenderMan-Installer-ncr-24.3/bin/RenderManInstaller

and just login with your renderman website account (the same you used to be able to download RenderMan). The installer will allow you to choose what components to install, please remember to check the Katana plugin.

In case you encouter this error:

Then there are big chances that the versions of libssl.so and libcrypto.so in your system are not compatible to RenderMan. In my case, I had the version 1.1.1 of those libraries, and RenderMan required an older version 1.0.2.

To avoid making a downgrade in your system libraries and end up breaking things, you can simply download the file openssl_1.0.2g.orig.tar.gz and do:

# extract files
tar -xf openssl_1.0.2g.orig.tar.gz
# jump into the makefile folder
cd openssl_1.0.2g.orig/openssl-1.0.2g
# configure with another install location
./config --prefix=/my/location --openssldir=/my/location/openssl shared
# build and install
make
make install

If everything works fine, you should find the *.so files in /my/location/openssl. Copy both libcrypto.so* and libssl.so* into the Qt lib folder.

Hopefully your login should work now!

Arch Linux⌗

In Arch I got an extra error when running prman:

...libtinfo.so.5: ... No such file or directory

In this case I installed the package from the AUR called ncurses5-compat-libs. When installing it with makepkg you may get an error about signature keys, in this case run

gpg --recv-keys <KEYID - See 'validpgpkeys' array in PKGBUILD>

Katana⌗

The installation of Katana itself didn’t got me any trouble. However, Katana complained about the version of libffi.so and didn’t open. My current version was the version 7.1.0 and Katana was requiring version 6.

My solution (maybe not the best one) was to download the deb package through the mirror link, and install

sudo apt install ./libffi6_3.2.1-8_amd64.deb

Depending on the language settings of your system, mine are

env | grep LC
LC_ADDRESS=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_NAME=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_TIME=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=pt_BR.UTF-8

you may get another error on openning Katana:

RuntimeError: The specified transform file '...srgb.spi1d' could not be loaded. 
Invalid 'From' Tag

It happens because the numbers in the file use . as decimal separator and your language uses ,. The lazy solution is to setup the LC_ALL enviroment variable right before launching katana:

env LC_ALL=C ./katanaBin

RenderMan for Katana⌗

The final step is to let Katana know where RenderMan is. In my case, RenderMan was installed at /opt/pixar. Now we need to define the following enviroment variables with their respective values (based on your installation paths):

# you may want to append to ${KATANA_RESOURCES} here
export KATANA_RESOURCES=/opt/pixar/RenderManForKatana-24.3/plugins/katana5.0
export RMANTREE=/opt/pixar/RenderManProServer-24.3
export RMAN_SHADERPATH=$RMANTREE/lib/shaders
export RMAN_RIXPLUGINPATH=$RMANTREE/lib/plugins

Again, remember to adapt the paths for the versions you installed.