so lets see if i undertood it properly.
renderman is a ubercool + expensive "procedural shader creator" + "renderer with radiosity (and all sorts of features)" and its so cool that you can achieve almost anyting procedurally without ever resorting to textures but to make letters...

And the pipeline would go as follows:
1 model and animate in maya (or whatever you use)
2 export it to rib
3 shade/texture it on renderman
4 render on renderman

thats right?