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View Full Version : Beta testers needed for Aqsis Renderman Renderer

Anteru
08-05-2003, 01:31 PM
Aqsis
Aqsis, a RenderMan® compliant renderer, is now – after five years of development – entering a crucial phase. While features have been added step by step for several years, the whole Aqsis team is now concentrating on stability and performance. To accomplish this, we need your help! Please go ahead and get the latest release from http://www.aqsis.com and test it. As Aqsis is OpenSource, you will never have to pay anything, even for commercially based work, and you can easily modify the source code. Try everything, most features have been tested, but usually not under production conditions. We would like to see Aqsis being used for commercial projects – movies, games or CAD visualization, for example. If you have never heard of Aqsis before, then you can read a bit about the feature-set of Aqsis below.


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Supported platforms:
Linux
Windows (98/ME and NT/2000/XP)
Mac OS X

Features:

Compatible with the RenderMan® Interface
RenderMan® shading language for shaders
RIB or direct linkage for scenes


REYES – based
High speed
Very low memory consumption
High-quality anti-aliasing
Fast 3D motion blur with support for arbitrary number of motion samples
True sub-pixel displacements
Efficient handling of NURBS and subdivision surfaces
Occlusion culling


Rich geometry support
NURBS
Subdivision surfaces with creases
Polygons
Curves
Points
Quadrics
Full support for CSG


Programmable shading
Support for light, surface, displacement, atmosphere and imager shaders
Support for DSO shadeops
Arbitrary output variables
Built-in baking functions


Procedural primitives
Ri to RIB library
Support for all procedural primitives


Ambient occlusion
Depth map based ambient occlusion


External resources
Support for a wide range of image formats, including JPEG, GIF, PNG
Direct rendering of non-mipmapped textures


Other features
Fractional matte objects
Level of detail
HDRI image support
Floating-point TIFF output
MtoR and Alfred compatibility


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Pixar & RenderMan are registered trademarks of Pixar. Alfred, Alfserver, Irma, “it”, MTOR & Slim are trademarks of Pixar.
Anteru
08-06-2003, 11:47 AM
And a feature I forgot:

SoftShadows: http://aqsis.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=464
R.Vor
08-23-2003, 03:06 PM
Renderman is Pixars renderer... ?
Or.... Explain plz :D
vaniljus
08-23-2003, 03:43 PM
No, Renderman is a open standard.

Pixars Renderman renderer is called PhotoRealistic RenderMan.

And I have a question:

Has anyone done a configfile for MayaMan to be used with Aqsis. If there is a site online with a configfile, please post a URL.
thomaspecht
09-02-2003, 09:31 PM
i've read on the aqsis forums that someone managed to get at least maxman and it's "magic shaders" to work with aqsis but he didn't told much about how to do it.
right now it seems that a maxman-generated rib won't even render with aqsis right out of the box.

free yet powerful renderers is a great thing to have but how come no one thinks about delivering tools to dock these renders to 3d animation packages? most artists probably don't care about investing a lot of effort into establishing a pipeline and rather prefer something that works out of the box even if it's not as full-featured and customizable as the stand-alone package.
pgregory
09-03-2003, 09:33 AM
That was me.

Unfortunately I no longer have access to a machine with Maxman on it so I can't get it working again. If you would like me to take a look at the files that you are experiencing failures with, please feel free to send them to me (or make them available for me to download). I'd need all shaders/rib/textures/scripts etc. I would then be happy to make any viable changes to Aqsis to make it more compatible with Maxman.

Contact me by email (pgregory@aqsis.com) if you want to discuss this further.

Cheers

PaulG
thomaspecht
09-03-2003, 06:31 PM
thanks for the response, i'll email you about this and provide maxman-generated sample-RIB's.
pgregory
09-05-2003, 09:21 AM
I have now managed, after some communication with Animal Logic, to get Aqsis to work directly with the latest (1.8) version of Maxman.

It highlighted a couple of bugs in both aqsis.exe and aqsl.exe (the shader compiler) which are now fixed. Also some small changes were needed to the Aqsis tools to make integration more seamless, argument support, and output format for the shader interrogation utility aqsltell.exe. Now, with a simple Aqsis configuration file for Maxman 1.8, and a very small change to one of the Maxman shader headers, I can render directly from 3DSMax 5 with Maxman.

The required fixes and changes are in Aqsis CVS ready for the next release, but if anyone who can build from CVS wants the configuration file please email me directly (pgregory@aqsis.com) and I will send it to them. With AL's permission I would like to provide the configuration file with future releases of Aqsis.

Cheers

PaulG
crgowo
09-08-2003, 02:13 AM
id love to help out but i dont have a means to get decent ribs out of maya. I should be getting c4d. i believe they have a beta rib export plugin.
pgregory
09-08-2003, 02:16 AM
If you are referring to Maya 5, I am now in a position to get you a working copy of LiquidMaya for Maya5, linked against Aqsis, and producing valid Aqsis files.

Contact me by email if you are interested.

Cheers

PaulG
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