Question to industry proffecionals and rman users.

[Mauritius]

Aqsis is RMan compliant. I hence have some trouble understandung your question.
You can throw a RIB at it that was intende to be rendered with PRMan and unless some unsupported (by Aqsis) features are used, you will likely get the 'same' image as you would have gotten from PRMan. Of course it will take longer to renderer but then Aqsis is free.

.mm

[thesaint]

I think the question was not 'how to' but 'have we'.

no. i haven't used it, but i do know that these RMan compliant renderers are enjoying a wide user base right now. Not many are open-source either. Being free doesn't always mean they open-source the app, maybe Aqsis is i don't know.

If you want to talk with other users try this newgroup.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=comp.graphics.rendering.renderman

Lots of members posting, including the very talented Wayne Wooten here at Pixar as well as other veterans of the code. Lots of discussions, tips and questions flying around about RMan complient renderers.

Hope it helps.

[Mauritius]

Aqsis is the only open-source RMan compliant renderer. There is another renderer that is open source and eats RIB, but this not enough to be eligible to be called "RMan compliant".

[thesaint]

tha's good to know, thank you Mauritius.

Have any of you tried 3Delight?? I have a copy running on my home machine and thought it was nice, but it still felt a little dark and mushy in the final renderings. Any thoughts?

I have never tried Aqsis, though i suppose i should, not like it costs me anything!

How do these freeware renderers compare with MR?? And despite the fact they are free are they worth it? I mean, they certainly look different to PRMan so you couldn't mix and match them, which one would you use and why?

[Mauritius]

Have any of you tried 3Delight?? I have a copy running on my home machine and thought it was nice, but it still felt a little dark and mushy in the final renderings. Any thoughts?

This is not possible. The only difference in the way the final output color is handled lies in the specular() function -- from the shader's pov.
Otherwise a RMan compliant renderer must return the 'same' color as another RMan compliant renderer if the same shading computations happen (I enclosed 'same' in quotaion marks, as the renderer's internal precision and some details of the resp. algorithms can play a minor role here that result in mathematically different colors. Still they should be preceived as being the 'same').

I guess your problem is plain that some display driver you use with another renderer that you compare to 3Delight has some internal gamma correction activated.

And indeed you can mix these renderers with e.g. PRMan. Otherwise you only need to ensure the renderings are aligned on the pixel grid. Though for 2k this is not such an issue, you can adjust this in the compositing app. I mixed PRMan with 3Delight several times now. In particular, I used 3Delight's deep shadow map suppport on a project last summer where volumetric (shadowed) clouds where required. PRMan 11 wasn't availbale then. The shop had only one PRMan license. We rendered everything in PRMan except for the cloud stuff that was done using 3Delight.

The whole idea of the RI interface was that you could take a RIB and throw it at two dieffernt renderers and get the same images (under the prequisite that no features are used in the RIB that one of both renderers is capable of while the other isn't). It was meant to be the Postscript of 3D and if you output a PS file on two different Postscript printers of different vendors you too get the same image (with the same exception stated above).

.mm

[thesaint]

I would disagree. I use 3Delight and PRMan at home and at work all the time, and i tell you that they look and feel different.
Here are the particulars:

1) The edge AA is handled, and looks, quite different and in 2k plates creates a moderate swimming effect. You could mix fx shots created in one renderer with animation created in another because that is at least consistent. But switching frames of a simple character animation where every other frame is rendered in 3Delight DOES cause swimming and it is noticable.

2) Colors shift enough to see them. I am happy to post examples for you. I rendered the standard color match plate here using 3Delight, RenderDotC and PRMan and the difference is perceptual. 3Delight goes muddier and RenderDotC pings a little harder in relation to PRMan. Now i am not saying which is better, i am just acknowledging the fact that there is a difference. Thus you cannot render sequential frames across different compliant renderers.

3) Displacement mapping in BMRT through rendrib is quite different from PRMan, which is why BMRT was not used for the whole scene in the mexican hat (Bug's Life) but was rather tuned to be a Ray Server that reported back to PRMan by Larry. The basic methods are the same, but as always, the devil is in the details. We own a lot of patents for some of the ways PRMan handles what it sees, so RMan compliancy does not mean identical render engines.

Sorry if this flies in the face of minor algorythm changes, but them are the facts, plain and simple. I invite anyone here to render an animation out using two or three renderers and get a seemless result.

[JasonA]

Interesting threads about renderers, I've been reading many of these here and in the Maya forum. I'm curious tho, how many folks here are using bmrt, 3d delight, or Aqsis without an interface?
I'd like to start working with an Rman compliant renderer to get familair with the RM standard, but frankly I find creating shaders from the command line to be a pretty hostile enviorment. And it seems that all of the avilable interfaces are pretty expensive in themselves.. (like MtoR, mayaman etc). I'm just a college student, and I can't afford $1000-$3000 just for an interface. Is there a free interface for any of these renderers?

[WireFX]

What do you mean with Interfaces?

A visual interface to create shaders or a interface to connect the animation program you use with the renderer?

For shaders take a look at: htp://dream.com.ua/thetool
where you can download shaderman which is a great visual tool for shader creation and it supports many renderman renderers.

As a connection to an animation programm ther are also a few free ones. For Blender there is "Blenderman" for Max there are the "Doberman" Scripts for free, I believe for Maya there is a free tool called "Liquid". I don´t know of any free ones for Lightwave or Cinema4d but maybe I am wrong.

But if you work with *.rib files ist never wrong to have a good editor at hand!

[JasonA]

yes actually I meant both really. Effectively like the RAT collection. Something that connects my model/animation app to the renderer without having to go to the command line, and an app to create (or translate) my shaders for an object without me having to create them from scratch.

I have Maya, and I only knew of RAT to date. Do most experienced users not bother with these tools?

[WireFX]

I have never used it but what I have heard it is a tool from weta which was used for Lord of the rings and is now released to the public. There is also a version which supports Aqsis as a renderer and if you whish you can visit Brian Perrys "Rhinoman" page, where he offers a beta of "Liquifier"
http://www.rhinoman.com/download.htm this seems to be also an additional to Liquid.

[JasonA]

I tried installing liquid, but after configuring the enviornment variables as noted in the install instructs, I can't get the plugin to load -- it doesn't show up in the plugin manager.

although I'm not sure, it could be that liquid is not compatible with Maya 4.5 (?) or I'm not dialing in the enviornment settings correctly (more likely the case). The install instructions are rather brief...

[pgregory]

The one on the Aqsis site is not compatible with Maya 4.5. If you need it I can send you a compiled binary of the .mll file compiled against the 4.5 sdk. Mail me (pgregory@aqsis.com)

I've been looking at it recently, and it is really very good, but as you mention, the documentation is lacking. I ended up having to look through the code to work out how to get it to do automatic shadows. But once you work these things out, it works a treat.

Cheers

PaulG

[fillfree77]

What I meant by this post is to promote people to actualy take their scenes and render them(with Aqsis and Liquid) and maybe post some pics here. I think I will try to get all the free models offered by CGTalk.com in Aqsis and see how it will go and probably update he post thiw the pics I got and rendertimes.

Hopefully some more kind people will do the same thing with their models or scenes.

[pgregory]

I have tried the models from the first free cgtalk batch, and they mostly worked ok as subdivision surfaces in Aqsis. A couple had some invalid mesh topology issues, but Maya's 'clean Topology' operator sorted those out. I haven't done anthing with them, but prove they can work...

http://aqsis.sf.net/forumpics/elf.jpg

1m30s AMD Athlon MP2000+

Cheers

PaulG

[fillfree77]

That is cool, but I think picture is too blury or is it only me.

[pgregory]

Probably, I made no attempt to light it properly, there are no shadows, and it probably uses a "gaussian" blur with high width. It wasn't really meant to represent anything more than to prove that Aqsis could easily handle the meshes as SDS.

Cheers

PaulG

[fillfree77]

One more thing. Where do I get binaries of LiquidAqsis compiled against Maya 4.5 and latest Aqsis. Those in the download section of Aqsis is for Maya 4.0.2 and will not load on Maya 4.5.

Please can some one post link to those.

[pgregory]

I'll see if I can post them tonight. I have it working in 4.5, just need to work out what goes into the archive and upload to aqsis.com.

Cheers

PaulG

[fillfree77]

Will be appriciated a lot. That will remove last stopper for me to do some tests.

[pgregory]

I have uploaded a version of the .mll file compiled against the 4.5 Maya SDK. It can be downloaded from the downloads section of the Aqsis site under Utilities and Tools, here (http://aqsis.sourceforge.net/index.php?module=download&action=showCat&cat=7).

The new archive only contains the new .mll file, for all the other support files you will need to download the original zip file.

HTH

Cheers

PaulG

[fillfree77]

Will get it as soon as I will get back home. Thanks again.

P.S. So anyone else want to try it out and show us some pictures done with Aqsis. Maybe with the shaders applied and all nice and cool.

[fillfree77]

Site seems to be don now. Can not load it at all. Will hopefully be there in few minutes.

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