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There's always 3Delight, which implements the same standard as PRMan, and is free for up to eight cores.

On the other hand, the question is about windows. Here's the best freeware list I've found, taken off of the neowin.net forums. These are not guaranteed Clean, but most of them are. Also, you might want to check tinyapps.org, which specializes in SMALL apps (usually not enough space for ad/spyware).
Category 3D Graphics: ----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/CharacterCountF ilterForAValidList----
3Delight Free - http://www.3delight.com/index.htm
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com/
Aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com/
Blender - http://www.blender3d.org/
gmax - http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
Houdini (Free Edition) - http://www.sidefx.com/apprentice/index.html
Maya Personal Learning Ed. - http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services...ple/i ndex.shtml
Now3D - http://digilander.libero.it/giulios/Eng/homepage.h tm
OpenFX - http://www.openfx.org
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/
Toxic - http://www.toxicengine.org/
Wings 3D - http://www.wings3d.com/
Category Anti-Virus:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Char acterCountFilterForAValidList----
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
Avast - http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1018.html
AVG - http://www.grisoft.com/
ClamWin - http://www.clamwin.com/
Category Anti Spyware:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Bazooka - http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/index.html
Diet K - http://www.dietk.com/
SpyBot Search & Destroy - http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
SpywareBlaster - http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.htm l
SpywareGuard - http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html
Category IRC Clients:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
BersIRC - http://www.bersirc.com/
BitchX - http://bitchx.org/download.php
HydraIRC - http://www.hydrairc.com/
TinyIRC - http://www.tinyirc.net/
XChat - http://www.silverex.org/news/
Category Audio Players:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
1by1 - http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~pesch
Billy - http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
CoolPlayer - http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
DeliPlayer. http://www.deliplayer.com/
Foobar 2

It produces better looking renders for a couple of reasons. First, they support just about every rendering gizmo under the sun (ie it was designed from the beginning with support for motion blur). Next, the textures and lighting are handled by an extremely scriptable shading engine (actually, scripting may not even be the right word here since you actually compile your shaders). Finally, since it is scriptable, it seems like a lot of academics in the graphics section of computer science use Renderman as the test bed for their ideas, resulting in Renderman usually being the first place to pull off a new technique (ie subsurface scattering).

Nope nope nope:

I wouldn't consider anything less than 512MB of RAM. Get as much RAM as you can afford, but spread the wealth; each machine on the renderfarm should have the same amount.

As others have pointed out, being able to cache the files locally is important. The individual rendering machines' disks need not be enormous; an 18GB SCSI disk would suffice. Each render node should have a 100Mbit ethernet card, and all should connect to a gigabit switch, which then connects to your file server and rendering job server.

As for actual software, Blender is the last thing he wants if he's trying to upgrade from Lightwave. Maya's animation, modelling, and dynamics are much better than Lightwave, but the stock Maya software renderer is worse.

When it comes to rendering software, there are a few options. When it comes to RenderMan-compliant renderers, there's BMRT, Entropy, 3Delight, RenderDotC, and, of course, Pixar's own PhotoRealistic RenderMan which, as of version 11, supports raytracing and global illumination. The problem with these is that Maya's built-in RenderMan exporter sucks, so you'll need a 3rd party one (Liquid is a good, open-source one that was written by a Weta employee and used on the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

However, Exluna, the company that made Entropy and owned the rights to BMRT, is no more. They were sued by Pixar on some bogus patent issue, and ended up getting bought by nVidia, who promptly discontinued development of Entropy. BMRT is no longer officially available.

3Delight seems to be fairly fast, but has limited raytracing abilities and no global illumination. It's available as a free download from 3delight.com, but only for private and limited-commercial use.

However, Maya versions 4.5 and up ship with mentalRay, the same ray-tracing global illumination renderer that comes with SoftImage, and unless I'm mistaken Alias has been kind enough to allow unlimited render nodes. This means you can buy one copy of Maya for doing your modelling and animation, and install Maya's software renderer or mentalRay on your renderfarm.

Also, unless you plan on using Maya's hardware renderer on the renderfarm (not really all that necessary; it's fast enough that you can do it on your workstation), not a single machine in your render farm needs a video card. Once they're set up and configured, there's no need for you to access them directly. Maya can do rendering without a GUI, and RenderMan renderers don't have GUIs.

3Delight is also a RenderMan(tm) compliant renderer. I cannot recommend it at this time though as I haven't done any testing with it.

This is a common confusion. RenderMan is a rendering interface a spec. Usually it's compared as the Postscript of 3D. You can implement a renderer that follows the RenderMan spec. Pixar's implementation is called Photorealistic RenderMan or PRMan for short. It uses the REYES (which stands for Renders Everything You Ever Saw)architecture for rendering (in gross termsZ buffer scanline renderer). Many people when they say RenderMan they actually mean PRMan. PRMan is sold by Pixar along with the RenderMan Artist Tools or RAT. But there exists many other implementations of the RenderMan spec, including BMRT, Entropy, RenderDotC, AQSIS, and AIR among others.

But when Pixar got started there was barely any adequate off the shelf software, so like many others back then (like PDI, Blue Sky Studios, Abel and Associates, triple I, etc), they had to create their own tools. Actually you can see mention of it at the end of the movie: Marionette is their animation environment, previously referred to as menv.

If you're interested in some other 3D software for Linux (some GPL, some not), there's 3dom, 3dpm, Behemot, G3D, Giram, 3delight, AC3D, and of course Blender as mentioned above.

Come on Karma, don't fail me now! The Linux Pimp