Beginning Renderman Shading Language

[ndeboar]

I would totally just start with standard renderman shaders, Slim is acutally far more complicated to work with (the shaders are all wrapped in TCL, which is a bit of an ugly langauge).

The reason i got into writting shader is so i could do things that standard maya shaders can't, eg oryen nayer diffuse, cook torrence specular, point based reflections.It doesnt do anything fancy with photo graphic textures (other than filter them in clever ways).Pretty sure most of Wall-E texture would have just been pained in photoshop using photo reference.

Does RFM trial come with a shader compiler?

I would strongly suggest checking out 3Delight as well. Air is renderman compliant, but it's not a REYES render.

[uphillcastle]

Thanks for clearing that up about photo textures. I was getting confused about how they achieved that kind of level of texture detail in writing code. I am only starting out you see. And I am more creative than technical but as Robert Rodriguez says in his 10 minute film school -

"Too many creative people don't want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? they become dependent on technical people."

So I am trying to get more technical. In fact I thought learning maya was technical and then I looked into renderman, which is a huge valley of shadows compared to maya....but I love the idea of it....typing symbols and it turning into something visual and whatnot

How did you learn? Did you teach yourself from books?/ or school?

Thanks

EDIT:I am not sure whether RFMeval comes with a shader compiler, I will have a gander.

[ndeboar]

Well, ive got the advantage of working with some brilliant shader writters at work, but i can recommend the escape renderman courseware. But this has been covered in other threads, do a serch for renderman in the light section and you'll see what i mean.

[mr Bob]

Hi ,
You mention that you are working on a short and do give the impression that your are really just starting out. Do you want to learn shading some shader writing to get better results for your short ? or is this a side learning process ? what's the priority.

I think your best off grabbing a copy of cutter http://www.fundza.com/ and starting from there.The basics are covered and you will get a basic grasp of whats going on while being able to build basic shaders all from the command line and a text editor. It just depends on what you can get access to with RFM.

If on the other hand you want to do your short and learn some more about building shaders but yet complete your project you should give Houdini a go as with Mantra you get access to all the shader goodness !

b

[uphillcastle]

Hi ,
You mention that you are working on a short and do give the impression that your are really just starting out. Do you want to learn shading some shader writing to get better results for your short ? or is this a side learning process ? what's the priority.

I think your best off grabbing a copy of cutter http://www.fundza.com/ and starting from there.The basics are covered and you will get a basic grasp of whats going on while being able to build basic shaders all from the command line and a text editor. It just depends on what you can get access to with RFM.

If on the other hand you want to do your short and learn some more about building shaders but yet complete your project you should give Houdini a go as with Mantra you get access to all the shader goodness !

b

Basically I want my short to look as good as possible, and if that entails learning RSL then I will do it. I figure I will be killing 2 birds with one stone so to speak, by adding more skills to what I can do...

But as Ndeboar mentioned alot of the textures made in Wall e (the kind of worn out look i am going for) were probably referenced from the real world and manipulated in photoshop, not really utilising RSL...

So I think I might go down the CS4 route for the time being and have RSL as a project to learn incrementally...

I cant really afford college at the moment so I am throwing questions out to you guys. Sorry about that, thanks anyhow I have a direction to aim at again :applause:

Edit- I have got hold of cutter and its great...

[rendermaniac]

I would second getting 3delight - it's a really good renderer and comes with 3delight for Maya - the first license is completely free (even for commercial use).

Slim is good for getting up and running quickly, and it lets you compartmentalise things easily - the SL box node lets you type in your own code. 3delight has a renderman code node which you can use in the Maya hypershade.

Learning RSL is easier writing stand alone shaders. Tools like Slim or vshade etc are more useful in production (unless you have a big dedicated shader team) as they make shaders faster to create and maintain.

The book "Advanced RenderMan" by Tony apodaca and Larry Gritz is a very good book to learn how RenderMan works. The articles on fundza.com give you some practical examples.

There was a good Siggraph paper about the shading and rendering on Wall E. I think they had a setup with a standard shader which was driven by some maps generated by the geometry (occlusion and distance from edges etc), but I cannot find it online (and renderman.org is down).

Simon

[ndeboar]

Yeah, i think you might want to keep things simple here, if your trying to learn RSL on top of making an entire short film, it might get a bit much. There is loads of amazing shader work done with out any RSL knowledge.

But, check it out when youve got some spare time though.

Nick

[mr Bob]

The Renderman shading language guide would also be a very good book to acquire !

b

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