Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

21 Dec 2001

Architosh RenderMan for OS X Petition: $2.3 million revenue opportunity for Pixar.

Architosh has been running a petition/survey on Pixar's RenderMan for Mac OS X. Since the announcement of Alias/Wavefront's Maya for Mac OS X the Mac market has seen an exponential demand and interest in the 3D market. Our continued survey results (shown in preliminary fashion here) substantiate this fact.

Just the Facts

Architosh has gathered over 150 petitions for RenderMan on Mac OS X. However, while that number is modest, the average seat count requirement (or amount of licenses requested) is 3.15 seats per petition. For a reference,this number is a little less than our Autocad for Mac OS X petition seat request average which means it's pretty good indication of multi-seat licenses.

We figure our RenderMan petition amounts to a conservative 471 seats of RenderMan for Mac OS X, based solely on the petitions received in 2001. If this software cost an average of $5000 per seat than that's $2.3 million in revenue for Pixar.

Put in perspective a bit, we were told (by those who know) that in the early 90's the cost of porting Autocad to the Mac was approximately $7 million. We are unaware of how much it would cost Pixar to port RenderMan to OS X but we figure being that OS X is UNIX that port job should NOT be nearly as complicated as Autocad was to port to the pre-PowerPC days of Mac OS 7.

It should also be taken under consideration that Architosh.com is still not known to many people. We are continually surprised in our email that experienced Mac 3D and CAD users are just now discovering the site. For all we know there may be twice as many potential RenderMan for Mac OS X users out there who have not taken the survey. To take the survey now go here. We continue to receive a dozen or so petitions each month so who knows how many potential RenderMan for OS X users are actually out there.

More Facts

This time around we saw in increase in the number of Pro 3D users requesting RenderMan for OS X. The Pro 3D user category is for film, special effects studios, and television- types of users. In our previous report of the data, this group constituted 33 percent of the petitions. This time around that number is up to 44 percent, or very close to half of all petitions.

That increase gave away at the expense of industrial designers, engineers, scientist, medical 3D and graphics professionals. Architecture users remained steady at 20-21 percent of those interested in RenderMan for OS X.

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