Renderman... how and where?

[Flinch]

http://www.pixar.com/renderman/artist_tools/index.html

1. yes. it's standalone.
2. it's in most cases faster than the built-in renderer.
3. you can use your old p90 if you like...


--Flinch


PS: maybe someone can write a tutorial "How to use internet-search-engines." or "Advanced Internet-Search Techniques" :beer:

[CitizenVertex]

Go to Pixar's site.

www.pixar.com

It's 8,000 dollars for the entire toolsuite for Maya including the renderer.

It's not a plug in renderer. It's a standalone renderer for use with any 3D application. You won't be able to just flick a couple switches and get nice results. It will not support certain features of Maya. You can get an additional plugin called MayaMan to convert shaders and additional features of Maya into Renderman, but you will still have to type.

You should be comfortable programming in C to use Renderman, and you need to know some higher level mathematics.

www.renderman.org is a good resource.

you should also read at least these two books

"The Renderman Companion"
"Advanced Renderman: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures"

Also read the Renderman Spec PDF available from Pixar's site, even if you can't understand most of it.

There's a news group with a FAQ that's moderated by Larry Gritz. He was one of the original engineers who created the Renderman spec. He now runs Exluna which makes Entropy and BMRT. These are also both Renderman compliant renderers. BMRT is free.

[Cadillacs57]

cool info here, thanks, i dont like programming, but if that is for 3d or animation then im on it

[greekdish]

Actually, you dont have to know programming to use Renderman....it actually IS a plug in renderer for Maya. Pixar's Maya's Artist Tools is a set of plugins for Maya that includes MTOR, and Slim....Slim is a regular plugin/procedural shading system used in Maya ot make shaders....it works very similar to the Attributes shading system in Maya, with ramps and presets already in there. Thats how you texture/shade your models in Maya, then just Render. It really is simple. I did all this in my Maya class at NYU. Granted, it was Maya Unlimited, so I dont know if you need Unlimited, or you can use Complete. But again, I reiterate, you dont need to know programming to make and use Renderman shaders in Maya. :thumbsup:

[CitizenVertex]

Renderman is a standalone renderer. MToR is a plugin interface from Maya to Renderman.

Renderman/RAT ships with a decent selection of precompiled shaders, but you only have access to the properties that a shader exposes. Most of the shaders are very specific, like brushed metal, glass, wood, ceramic, skin, plastic, etc. They all give you a few options to play with, but in a lot of cases you can't do much more than adjust the colors. If you use Renderman eventually you have to start typing, otherwise you'd be much better off using Maya's default renderer. Renderman is deffinitely not easy to use. Just putting a texture on an object requires two shaders and you have to convert your image map for Renderman.

If anyone wants to give Renderman a try, you can get a free limited demo of the MayaMan plugin from Animal Logic for use with BMRT. BMRT is free if you can still find it somewhere. MayaMan is much more comfortable for beginners than RAT. It exports alot of features right out of Maya including shaders, so you don't have to mess around with programming and templates unless you really want to.

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