Pixar's RenderMan Software

3Delight 4.5 available!

2005-08-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

3Delight 4.5 is now available and can be downloaded at the 3Delight website. There are quite a few new features in this release and it's worth checking out. I use Silo in conjunction with 3Delight and they work great together. For Silo users out there, here are somethings that I have been doing with 3Delight. Under Materials/Light, go to Render options, and select RIB as the Render File Format. Click on the Options button next to RIB and set these settings if you want. I checked all the boxes for Include and with Override Material Names, I typed plastic. This means it will render your objects with the default RenderMan plastic shader. You can also check Include Header to point the renderer to a text file that you created that will render your objects with shadows from within Silo. You should add a light to the Silo scene and now you can move the light in Silo and see where your shadows will end up when you do a test render. Don't forget to select Use Custom Lighting under Materials/Light. In the header file, put just these two lines and you should see shadows in your test renders in Silo.

Attribute "visibility" "transmission" "opaque"
Attribute "light" "shadows" "on"

Shadows are essential, they give your objects a sense of substance. I'll post how to do raytraced and deep shadows later on. In Render Command/Program under Render Options, select renderdl.exe from the 3Delight installation folder as your renderer. That's it, Silo and 3Delight work together really well and the rendering speed has to be seen to be believed.

www.3delight.com

www.nevercenter.com

Siggraph 2005

2005-08-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

Well, Siggraph 2005 just finished last Thursday and I must say it was a pretty good one. It took place in Los Angeles for the second year in a row which works out well for those of us that live here. Saw a lot of exciting new products that will be released end of this year or beginning next year. RenderMan for Maya looks promising and could take off quickly once it becomes available. Brazil for Maya as well as Final Render for Maya were also shown to visitors on the exhibition floor. ILM had a huge presence this year with an X-Wing sitting at the entrance of the convention center. Softimage had a really large booth this year and was showing XSI 5 as well as Softimage FaceRobot. Alias also showed some Maya 7 stuff at the AGUA party and at their booth. The Houdini party was great and was so crowded! Houdini 8 is now in public beta and includes the exciting DOPs. The most exciting paper for me this year was Henrik Jensen's paper with Craig Donner, Light Diffusion in Multi-Layered Translucent Materials. Hal Bertram showed some exciting interactive RenderMan rendering at the RenderMan User Group. Check his site out for the video that was shown at the RenderMan User Group.

http://www.halbertram.com/

I've been busy

2005-03-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated this blog in a while but I've got some RenderMan-related news. 3Delight has been updated to version 4 and has new licensing. The first license is free with additional licenses costing $1000. The release date of the video lessons for RenderMan, Gelato, and Cg from Bruno Patatas of PixelBox Academy has been pushed back to April 2nd. The lessons are coming, we just have to wait a little longer.

PixelBox Academy - http://www.rendermanacademy.tk

RfB resource website and Cutter 4.2.7

2005-02-15T01:21:00.000-08:00

The resource website for Rendering for Beginners: Image synthesis using RenderMan has been updated. The contents for Chapter 4 is now online with only Chapter 8 left to go. Malcolm Kesson's Cutter program has also been updated from 4.2.5 to 4.2.7. 4.2.7 adds support for the Aqsis renderer which went to 1.0 in January.

RfB - http://www.smartcg.com/tech/cg/books/RfB/download/contents/index.html
Cutter 4.2.7 - http://www.fundza.com
Aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com

Muse_Alpha0.3.1 and MentalRIB

2005-02-07T23:48:00.000-08:00

I came across two items that might be of interest to RenderMan users. Muse is a RenderMan-compliant rendering system created to produce high-quality imagery for illustration, animation, film and other demanding applications...at least that's what the website says. The key features of Muse are:

Very rich and complex geometry support. Muse will support a wide range of geometric objects such as NURBS, polygon meshes, and subdivision surfaces.
State of the art ray-tracing with a powerful Monte-Carlo ray-tracing engine, Muse will deliver groundbreaking ray-traced imagery.
Support for photon-mapping and subsurface scattering. Due to the Monte-Carlo ray-tracing, Muse will be able to deliver support for both techniques that are revolutionizing today's 3D imagery.
Support for OpenEXR and the HDR image format. Muse will support the 32-bit floating-point data type and the 16-bit "half" data type.

So far, the three images in the gallery look promising. Muse is definitely something to keep an eye on. It is in alpha right now and the source code is available for download from the website. MentalRIB is a converter from Maya scene files and shaders into RenderMan RIB and shading language (via MentalRay).

Muse - http://www.viarender.qn.com
MentalRIB - https://sourceforge.net/projects/mntlrib

3Delight 3.0.1

2005-01-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

3Delight has been updated from 3.0 to 3.0.1. The 3.0.1 release includes:

Fixes

Fixed a glitch with RiCurves rendering when motion blur was used.

Removed some annoying error messages that were displayed during some Windows renderings.

The i-display FrameBuffer

This utility is now more efficient in terms of CPU usage. Draw as Textured Polygon is now the default.

3Delight 3.0.1 - http://www.3delight.com

An update

2005-01-17T18:13:00.000-08:00

I said I would try to update this blog often but I have not been that diligent. I'm actually in the middle of helping getting a SIGGRAPH paper together. I started reading Rendering for Beginners: Image synthesis using RenderMan by Saty Raghavachary. The whole book is in color and from what I have read so far, the book reads well and is fairly thorough. Saty also provides a companion website that contains the example code for all but two of the chapters. For users of Liquid, a free Maya to RenderMan translator has been updated and is available at the Liquid Wiki maintained by Moritz Moeller. The RenderMan compliant renderers supported by Liquid right now are 3Delight and Pixie. I personally prefer 3Delight because I like the look and quality of the images it generates. Professor Malcolm Kesson's Cutter has also been updated from 4.2.3 to 4.2.5.

Cutter 4.2.5 - http://www.fundza.com

RfB - http://www.smartcg.com/tech/cg/books/RfB/home/index.html

Liquid Wiki - http://www.plastickitten.net/liquidwiki/index.php/Main_Page

Cook by Nikolay V. Ragozin

2005-01-04T20:01:00.000-08:00

I came across this today but haven't tried it out yet. Cook is a solution for capturing render-time data provided by Pixar's RenderMan and storing it in a 2D image that can later be mapped back for rendering. The process is also known as "baking" in other software packages. Caching expensive calculations such as indirect illumination as a texture map to be referenced at render time will save you some render time.

Precise results with automatic extrapolating borders and hole filling to minimize artifacts at later renders.
Slim templates designed to give flexibility in designing what to cook.
Cooking agent displaying runtime results about current cooking(s).
Mask of Cook data can be provided.
Network spreaded cooking and rasterizing with Alfred.
2 pass Cooking produces temporary binary cache file of captured data, which is rasterized separately.
Ability to append data to cache files.
Incremental Cook allow to make more precise Cooks of the point of interest.
Coming soon - DSO for support of cached resolution-independent files as textures.

Check it out here - http://www.thekitchen.ru/CookPage.html

Meshes with subsurface scattering shader

2005-01-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

I did these renderings today. All the head meshes were from Cyberware, the subsurface scattering shader was from 3Delight and the images were rendered with 3Delight. I will describe how I rendered the images in an upcoming post. I will post the RIB files as soon as I figure how to upload them to the blog.

Happy New Year & Official Launch

2005-01-01T02:10:00.000-08:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Just got back from a great rave party in downtown LA. Now that the new year is here, I am officially launching this little blog dedicated to Pixar's RenderMan. To commemorate the launch, here are some links for you to check out.

Alias Maya 6 - http://www.alias.com
Pixar's RenderMan Pro Server 12 - https://renderman.pixar.com
3Delight 3.0 - http://www.3delight.com
Nevercenter Silo 1.3 - http://www.nevercenter.com
Malcolm Kesson's Cutter 4.2.3 - http://www.fundza.com

Blog Launch on January 1, 2005

2004-12-31T02:49:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

I've decided to officially launch the blog on January 1, 2005. I feel that is appropriate for I look forward to sharing and learning something new in the coming year about RenderMan. Stay tuned.

An Introduction

2004-12-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

On this little blog, I hope to share what I've learned so far about Pixar's wonderful suite of rendering tools, RenderMan. I have several RenderMan books, countless PDFs, and numerous websites that I read regularly. I will post my own RIB files and shaders for readers to download and experiment on their own. My RenderMan knowledge is limited of course, but I hope to at least contribute to the growing but still scarce practical RenderMan tutorials on the web. I will also be posting any news or tools that I come across relating to RenderMan. I hope in doing so, anyone interested in learning more about RenderMan will be able to walk away with some confidence and knowledge to further explore RenderMan. I am planning to update the blog two times a week depending on my workload.