Renderman non commercial release

mjc1016

Mustakettu85 said:

Physically based shaders won't work at all without re-writing (different syntax, different shadeops actually).

I didn't want to get that specific...it might scare people....shadops...sounds sort of like black magic or something.;-P Fortunaetly most of the DS shaders are 'old school' and should be able to be easily translated.

It would be nice if I could actually get it downloaded, but I've been having trouble getting the downloader to complete, so it's going to be a while before I can start testing it out.

Takeo.Kensei

mjc1016 said:

StratDragon said:

angusm said:

Pixar have apparently now made an unlimited version of their Renderman software free for non-commercial use:

http://renderman.pixar.com/view/non-commercial-renderman

I don't believe that any of DAZ's software can directly output RIB format files for use with Renderman, but it might be possible to use another tool such as Blender as an intermediary.

I don't know enough about Renderman to know whether this is a big deal or 'Ho-hum', but I thought I'd share this in case it's of interest to someone.

.RIB is by definition RenderMan Interface Bytestream
You can output an .RIB with Studio from the render tab, that option has been there since the first versions of Studio I think.
But the .RIB from Studio to Pixar Renderman won't give you a finished product at this time. the remaining problem for Studio users right now is the lack of a shader converter like the ones available for those of use who use LuxRender.

And for the most part, converting the shaders will be just a simple matter of recompiling them...some may not compile in Renderman, but there's a very high rate of compatibility between 3DL and Prman, at the shader level. It's worst with the newer shaders, using the new raytracing implementations in each one and best with the older shaders. The current problem is, that some of the 'base' shaders, while having the source code embedded to allow for recompiling, probably won't compile under Prman. There are probably even some that will run without any kind of recompile, needed. I still don't have it installed yet, so I don't know exactly what it would take to recompile them. And nothing out of ShaderMixer will work right, as Prman won't understand the way DS passes the 'bricks' out to make up a shader (if ShaderMixer actually compiled a 'finished' shader file, that wouldn't be too much of a problem...).

I don't think that will be so easy or only for old shader type. Pixar stopped publishing RISPEC since 2005 which means you can only try to reproduce with guess what is done in PRMan. And many Features are not in 3delight. Especially concerning RSL2.0 implementations. I remember reading somewhere the Delight Team sometimes implemented their own stuff

Mustakettu85

Takeo.Kensei said:

Pixar stopped publishing RISPEC since 2005 which means you can only try to reproduce with guess what is done in PRMan.

There is a lot of quite up-to-date documentation in the Renderman University alone, PBS included (that's how I know it's not the same as in 3Delight =)). What I haven't seen yet is indepth docs on their new RIS framework, but then, I wasn't actually looking.

mjc1016

Takeo.Kensei said:

I don't think that will be so easy or only for old shader type. Pixar stopped publishing RISPEC since 2005 which means you can only try to reproduce with guess what is done in PRMan. And many Features are not in 3delight. Especially concerning RSL2.0 implementations. I remember reading somewhere the Delight Team sometimes implemented their own stuff

If/when I can ever get it downloaded, I'll start playing...I get to between half and 2/3 downloaded and the connection drops. So all I can do is delete the partial file and try again.