Hiya, and sorry for not seeing this question sooner!

As Paul suggests, any more information you can give as to the platform and your experience will help us tailor answers to suit. Specifically are you using Mac/Linux, and have you got experience using the command-line terminal?

The installation instructions are a bit lean, and I'll try to elaborate on them here, but if you have experience building opensource software from source and are on mac/linux then chances are you'll be able to get rmanconnect working reasonably quickly.

The documentation does have better details on how to use the display driver and plugin once they're built and installed but does require a basic understanding of how to specify display drivers in RIB and how to load nuke pluings.

So, onto the answer ;) To build and install RmanConnect there are three basic steps:

1. installing the necessary dependencies
2. building rmanconnect from it's source code
3. install rmanconnect so nuke and your renderer can see it

1) Installing Dependencies

You will obviously need Nuke and a Renderman renderer (either PRMan or 3Delight) installed and running correctly on your system.

You will also need to install a couple of other things: the Boost libraries, the IlmBase library from the OpenEXR project, and CMake.

• Boost: http://www.boost.org/
• OpenEXR: http://www.openexr.com/
• CMake: http://cmake.org/

Please refer to those sites for installation details for your platform. These are quite common applications so depending on your flavour of system there maybe pre-built packages that you can easily download and install using tools such as macports (on mac).

2) Building RmanConnect

The first step is to download and uncompress an archive of the source code. You can grab that here: http://github.com/danbethell/rmanconnect/tarball/rmanconnect-0.3

On my mac i just uncompress it using the tar command...

$ tar zxvf ~/Downloads/danbethell-rmanconnect-rmanconnect-0.3-0-g108251d.tar.gz

Once you've uncompressed the archive cd into the source directory and run cmake . (don't forget the dot!).

$ cd danbethell-rmanconnect-rmanconnect-0.3-0-g108251d
$ cmake .
-- The C compiler identification is GNU
-- The CXX compiler identification is GNU
-- Checking whether C compiler has -isysroot
-- Checking whether C compiler has -isysroot - yes
-- Check for working C compiler: /usr/bin/gcc
-- Check for working C compiler: /usr/bin/gcc -- works
-- Detecting C compiler ABI info
-- Detecting C compiler ABI info - done
-- Checking whether CXX compiler has -isysroot
-- Checking whether CXX compiler has -isysroot - yes
-- Check for working CXX compiler: /usr/bin/c++
-- Check for working CXX compiler: /usr/bin/c++ -- works
-- Detecting CXX compiler ABI info
-- Detecting CXX compiler ABI info - done
-- Boost version: 1.40.0
-- Found the following Boost libraries:
--   system
-- Found Nuke
-- Could NOT find Doxygen  (missing:  DOXYGEN_EXECUTABLE)
-- Found 3Delight
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /Users/dan/danbethell-rmanconnect-rmanconnect-0.3-0-g108251d

Don't worry that CMake couldn't find Doxygen... it's only used to generate the documentation. Provided cmake runs like that (i.e. without error, meaning it can find all the dependencies it requires) then you can run make.

$ make
Scanning dependencies of target nuke_plugin
[ 14%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/nuke_plugin.dir/src/nk_rmanConnect.cpp.o
[ 28%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/nuke_plugin.dir/src/Server.cpp.o
[ 42%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/nuke_plugin.dir/src/Client.cpp.o
[ 57%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/nuke_plugin.dir/src/Data.cpp.o
Linking CXX shared library nk_rmanConnect.dylib
[ 57%] Built target nuke_plugin
Scanning dependencies of target rman_plugin
[ 71%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/rman_plugin.dir/src/d_rmanConnect.cpp.o
[ 85%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/rman_plugin.dir/src/Client.cpp.o
[100%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/rman_plugin.dir/src/Data.cpp.o
Linking CXX shared library d_rmanConnect.dylib
[100%] Built target rman_plugin

3) Installing RmanConnect

The build step produces two files:

• d_rmanConnect.so (or d_rmanConnect.dylib on mac)
• nk_rmanConnect.so (or nk_rmanConnect.dylib on a mac)

The first is the RenderMan display driver. You should check your renderer documentation on how to tell your renderer specifically where to find the file. Normally it's as simple as adding a line to your rendermn.ini configuration file.

The second file in the Nuke plugin. The Nuke documentation can tell you how to properly install plugins but I find copying the file into the ~/.nuke directory is often easiest.

That just about covers it, but let us know if (and where) you have particular problems.

dan