Pixar Renderman

Since I have access to Pixar Renderman here at my university I choose to aim my third term research project towards this industry standard renderer to get more familiar and confident with it. I am looking at the whole package going from the structure of RIB archives to the renderman shading language and SLIM to renderman implementations as for example renderman for maya.

To get to know RIB files I am writing a basic python based RIB exporter for XSI while learning SL and give it a try writing some custom shaders. What implementations concerns I’ve been testing renderman for maya thoroughly and the new 3delight integration for XSI.

I’ll come up with some more extensive post describing my research and findings but I can already say that I quite like renderman and definitely see it’s benefits. See below a test I got out of renderman for maya rendering out maya fur.

Shading Rate 1.0 – Pixel Samples 3.0 3.0

Don’t mind the grooming and style of the fur since I didn’t spend time on that but note the very crisp detail and nice shadowing going on. To achieve this I took advantage of renderman’s deep shadow and sigma hiding features(no ray tracing). Especially the sigma hiding does a really nice job together with fur. It enables a sort of alternate hiding algorithms designed especially for use with very small, thin, or transparent geometry.

Also the depth of field is coming straight out of the renderer, no post editing applied. The HD1080 render took about 14 minutes on an 8core machine with 4gb of ram.

More on this soon.

Jo