RenderMan Artists Tools

RenderMan Artist Tools, also known at R.A.T. is a set of plug-ins and tools produced by Pixar for better integration of Pixar Animation Studio's RenderMan and Autodesk's Maya. This tool set includes MTOR (Maya To Renderman), Slim (An Node Based Interface for building shaders), It (Image Tool) , and Alfred (Rendering Distribution Tool). This is not a complete list of all the tools that come in the package though. These tools allow artists to take better control of RenderMan's extensive and powerful abilities without having a computer science background. MTOR allows the users of Maya to export their files into RIBs, apply RenderMan shaders through Slim, convert models to Pixar Sub-D's (Sub-Division Surfaces), among a plethora of other powerful tools otherwise unavailable to the normal Autodesk Maya user.