Proof of concept: Maxtor

#179

bump…
:shrug:

#180

It isn’t abandoned until the developer says you can have it.

I’m sure it isn’t a licensing problem. The Renderman Spec is open.

#181

It is a beta licensing problem that blocks the access to the newest update he posted. The older one is operable, but it has some issues at this point. I would buy a license if I only knew how…

It would be wonderful if he would give an update so I can at least know what is going on with, this plugin is pretty important for my pipeline at this stage… No renderman for Max means a very slow workflow until somtething else comes along or I find the time to write something.

So, with that said…

BUMP :shrug:

#182

Pm the guy. see if he will respond in private.

#183

I actually did already, but I received no response.

I am doing some R and D with a plugin called Polytrans but it is ignorant of the shader language and it leaves me having to open up the RIB file and search out the shaders. I havent the time for that. It works like a charm in getting my gemotry to Renderan and its the only plugin so far that wites a RIB that Renderman actually acknowledges as valid.

I wish I had the money to hire a RIB programmer, than he could just sit and write the 30 million point references that are necessary for a mid size scene.

If I rehost the older version would someone be committed to help me develop it? The old MAXscripts are not encrypted and there is no copyright notice so I can only assume that they are up for development. I can use my own server space to host the scripts and updates.

Let me know.

  • Evan
#184

Well I know absoulutly zilch about renderman, but Id be upfor beta testing anything you work on.

#185

Yeah, that would be good. I just wish our friend could come by and at least let me know the concept he was working towards. I understand the general idea behind his script but without being able to look at the code for the newest ones I have no idea how he came to where he was because outside of RSL, MAXscript and Python I am ignorant. C++ is like chinese to me.

  • Evan
#186

Well, thought I would bump this again to let our man know that I am still interested and wondering why the bad business. :wavey:

#187

Stop bumping this thread. He isn’t going to show up after 9 months because you suddenly want it. You’re just spamming.

And no. Just because it isn’t encrypted doesn’t mean it isn’t copyrighted. Unless he explicitely said. “This is available under an open license.” or “feel free to modify and distribute this code.” it should be considered closed source.

#188

Well I am not so sure that bumping a thread due to interest is spamming, or why you would take it so personally, or command me to stop bumping a thread (By the way, you did it for me that time) :eek: . I have an interest in using the wheel, not reinventing it, so it is very far from spamming.

I am not sure that you can completely understand the worth of that little tool to Max centered pipelines that implement Renderman, or an equivalent renderer like 3Delight.

But anyway, there are moderators for a reason my friend, and they dont seem to have a problem if I occasionally bump a thread that raises great suspicion as this kind of mysteriously dissappeared. You dont know, just like I dont, whether or not he will comment.

There is a great interest in something like this, but please, just because you dont share it does not mean that it has to dissapear. Thanks for your concern however, as I know (or at least think) you didnt mean anything negative harsh by what you said.

  • Evan
#189

We could use this thread to discuss if a renderman renderer is viable to a single artist or a small company since for me it looks like as if all the shaders must be written or build from ground up. Can someone that worked with renderman, even from maya, tell something about the workflow? For me it looks a viable only on big production studios.

#190

The great thing is Renderman ships with alot prebuilt shaders to get you started. It takes some time to get to know the shader language, but the premade shaders are easily editable and mst of th time, if you need something even a little more complicated like subsurf for skin or wax or something, you can find a shader that is close and just edit it until you get what you need.

Slim is also a very easy way to build shaders from the ground up, and edit pre existing ones. There is other node based tools as well like Dark Tree. But to really utilize the shader language it is best to learn it. I think it is definitely a viable option for a single artist, that is why Pixar developed Renderman for Maya I am pretty sure. The studio package has Slim, It, Alfred and Nimby that comes with it, and especially Alfred would be hard pressed to find a place in the workflow of a single artist (but it is possible).

There are also tools like 3Delight, which is a freeware that they used on Superman Returns, and that is just like Renderman, with a few things missing obviously.

  • Evan
#191

I share your interest. But how long will you post messages that say nothing more than “bump” every 3 hours? 1 day? 2 days? 2 weeks? People assume the reason a thread is back at the top is because there is new information. If you cry bump too many times people will just ignore it and you’ll kill the thread. A post that says “bump” every 3 hours is as much spam as “Buy Viagra!”

#192

What is the difference between a post like yours, and one that says bump? Both seem to have equal value in the light of the topic of the thread, and neither contribute new developments to the tool. The difference is I am using Renderman and would love to have this tool to get RIB files from Max that actually have shader information.

So the difference I think is motive. “Buy Viagra” has nothing whatsoever to do with this plugin, I want to at least find out why he stopped development, or get permission to continue it.

  • Evan
#193

Hey Evan, thanks for the information about the shaders.

I’ve read a lot about how renderman work, but it’s hard to find information from the user POV. So, what about the lighting? I’ve seen in the tests using shadow maps most of the time, is this the common approach?

I’ve also seen lots of debate about renderman versus raytracers, each one have pros and cons but it seems to me that the reyes approach came from a time with very slow computers when tracing a ray was so damn slow. Today we (in 3dsmax) are most of the time working with raytracing renders (mray, vray, finalrender, brazil), that must be a hard move going to a reyes render, isn’t it? Do you have to avoid tracing rays? I’ve read that 3delight is really fast on raytarcing, but still this is not the main focus on reyes render, right?

I was asking about a single user because it seems on big productions that you can render each part on what render works best, but for me it seems that raytracers can go well on most of the jobs, or am I wrong?

Cheers and thanks for the information!

Flávio

#194

Whatever. I was not looking to start a flame war with you. We have differing opinions on forum etiquete but you’re right this is certainly not the place to debate about it.

#195

Well I did some research into the mysterious dissappearence of EVERY plugin that hooks Max to Renderman, and I am pretty sure that most of the plugins fell victim to Pixars greedy lawsuit against the developers of Entropy and BMRT. It is a long story that you can read for yourself, but it is really horrible what Pixar did. So Animal Logic couldnt produce there pludin because it depended on BMRT, and I am wondering if our guy here faced some legal troubles from Pixar as well.

It is quite interesting that ONLY the plugins for Max dissappeared because as far as I know Animal Logic still develope and supprts Mayaman. But it is also quite interesting that the guy Pixar sued was hired by nVidia and developed Gelato, and Frantic has a great connction plugin for Max called Amerretto. Gelato is almost just like Renderman, and I would say alot of advances beyond where Renderman has come thus far.

Anyhow, I actually found a legal copy of Animal Logics plugin and it is unusable without BMRT, plus I dont have a license. Our friend here may have fallen victim to Pixar just like the developers before… who knows.

Just thought I would give an update, I will be doing a demo of Gelato soon, and also I will be continuing my work on MAx and Renderman integration… even though it is quite a daunting task.

  • Evan
#196

I am a loyal Max user, so I know what you mean about raytracing, but Renderman has an extremely fast… (and stolen) …raytracing engine. I say stolen because they sued the guys that developed entropy and took the algorithm from them… ANYHOW see my last post for info on that…

But in order to get proper occlusion you have to enable raytracing or it doesnt work right. But I have found it to be faster than VRay (I used to use VRay daily) and much faster than Mental Ray. The only renderer that I find can compar to speed is Final Render (this is the renderer I use most often and is my favorite for production). When put to the test Final Render can keep up with Renderman on most things, except extremely large environments that are volumetric intensive, as Renderman and Final Render can both display some troubles in this area, at least in my experience.

Regarding the shadow maps… really every renderer depends on shadow mapping as that is intrinsic in a lighting setup. The difference is Renderman has their patented “Deep Shadows” which allows for motion blur being applied to shadows, as well as extremely detailed and fast hair and fur shadows. Modo 401 just implemented this technology but they should probably watch for the Pixar legal team or Pixar will end up owning Modo (sorry, but after reading the legal history of Renderman I cant help but be cynical).

But the debates about raytracers and Renderman were back before Pixar stole the raytracing algorithm from Entropy, now Renderman is just as much a raytracer as VRay. The question now is speed and features. Renderman can create and render amazing occlusion very fast, which is what attracted me to it, as well as the fully programmable shaders.

On a different note though, DEFINITELY check out Gelato if you are interested in using a Renderman standard renderer inside of Max. It is really an amazing renderer for the money (it is free) and it operates just like PRman. It has the programmable shaders, the beautiful fast occlusion, and the deep shadows. Its raytracing is advanced further than Renderman naturally, and best of all it is free, so you save 5000 dollars. The only downside is if you are looking at pipeline integration with a server app, Gelato doesnt have that. Although I am sure that Frantic’s “Deadline” app could easily take the place of Alfred (Rendermans server app).

I am building a render farm at my home, and am in desperate need of render management which is why I started this investigation. I finally am starting to face the reality that I am hard up to get another staff job like my last one, and I am going to have to buckle down and get to freelancing.

I hope that helps a little. Any other questions you have feel free to ask.

  • Evan
#197

Er, sorry to be blunt but that is plain bollocks. :slight_smile:
Developing a plug-in costs money, the economic viability is a function one of whose main variables is the potential number of licenses sold. 3dsmax, lets face it, is not used in high end visual effects much. The main package here is Maya.

This is the only reason there is no good RenderMan bridge for 3dsmax.
Because developing such a plug-in will take two man years.

Many hobbyist developers don’t understand that when they start; they think merely exporting a RIB of every piece of geometry in your max scene is enough.
Once they understand their misconception, many stop because the tasks seems to daunting.

Commercial-scale development needs a good prospect in terms of license numbers (and people paying support afterwards) to be sustainable.
RMan-compliant renderers are used mainly in high end VFX. This is an absolute niche market (read: very few licenses sold) which is why the only companies offering good RMan plug-ins for even Maya are companies that also write such renderers themselves (DNAsoft & Pixar) or who use them in their own productions (Animal Logic) so the plugin becomes a sales multiplier for the main product (renderer) or is an existing asset of the company anyway (Animal Logic) whose making available, commercially, to third parties, can help ease the costs of developing it for the existing needs, in house, anyway.

BMRT has absolutely nothing to do with that. You don’t need a renderer even to create such a plug-in. You don’t even need a RIB binding, you can roll your own. Sometimes you even have to. I wrote my first RMan exporter for Real3D on Windows NT in 1996. In a FORTH dialect called RPL. There was no way you could use any exisiting RIB binding (there were 3, at the time, BMRT, RenderDotC and PRMan). So I rolled my own (as could an can anyone else).

Furthermore, the license agreement that was formerly necessary, with Pixar, to develop a RenderMan-compliant renderer, has been waived since years (by Pixar).
But what is more, it was never required to develop a plugin that spits out RIB or links with a RMan-compliant renderer directly!
These things Pixar had exempt from requiring a licenses from the beginning, since at the beginning (in 1989), the RI spec had been envisioned as an industry standard that should be encouraged to be adapted by as many people & companies as possible. That stance has certainly changed. :wink:

If you wanted to develop a plug-in and not go through the hassle of writing your own binding, you can use Aqsis or Pixie’s bindings. Or even 3Delight’s.

I would thus be curious to learn about your “research” that suggests the availability of MaxMan (or its lack, thereof) has anything to do with the disappearance of BMRT (or Entropy).

It is quite interesting that ONLY the plugins for Max dissappeared because as far as I know Animal Logic still develope and supprts Mayaman. But it is also quite interesting that the guy Pixar sued was hired by nVidia and developed Gelato, and Frantic has a great connction plugin for Max called Amerretto.

There never was a guy who developed ‘Gelato’, Gelato was developoed by a team of software engineers. Larry Gritz, who you are probably referring to, was not hired by nVidia as a sole person, to do so.

Larry was the author of BMRT and chief engineer of Entropy, a renderer which was based on BMRT’s source. BMRT in term was written by Larry during his student days. Entropy was marketed by start-up called Exluna that had three principal founders (as far as I recall).
Pixar sued Exluna and their founders (among them Larry), personally, for trade secret infringement. Mind you, they worked on PRMan, at Pixar, before – almost all of them. The claim sounded kind of valid, greed aside.

 We never know what the outcome of the lawsuit would have been, but the bottom line is that nVidia made an offer, at the time, to buy Exluna. At the same time Exluna reached a settlement with Pixar that would mean BMRT & Entropy would be pulled from the market and Pixar would withdraw the lawsuit.
 
 After the aquisition through nVidia, Larry, Matt and all the others supposedly wrote a new renderer for their new employer, from scratch, named Gelato.

Which stupidly depended on an nVidia GPU to be present in the system it ran on, to do its deed. I say stupidly particularly because these are bright people, so I would bet almost any sum that this was not their idea but that of their new employer, nVidia.
I said “supposedly” above because I don’t believe that you can write a renderer like Gelato from scratch in such a short time frame it supposedly took them and also because it curiously suffered from some of the same bugs that Entropy had had (I was a beta tester of Entropy and had a close look at Gelato, for the reasons I touched above).

Gelato is almost just like Renderman, and I would say alot of advances beyond where Renderman has come thus far.

Like what, exactly?

Gelato is not a RenderMan compliant renderer. It is slow, was buggy, last time I tested it (I evaluated it for use in feature film pipeline in 2005, we ended up using 3Delight instead).

Gelato was total failure, commercially, because nVidia decided to make it depend on hardware. No one buys such a renderer. There are numerous threads were I commented on this on CGTalk in more detail.

You can find them by search for ‘Gelato’ and my user name.

Why Gelato totally failed, has many reasons. Hardware dependency was one. Another one was probably that is was still slower than most of its non-hardware accelerated competitors.

All this has absolutely nothing to do, however, with the availability of plug-ins to export to RenderMan compliant renderers, from 3dsmax.

Anyhow, I actually found a legal copy of Animal Logics plugin and it is unusable without BMRT, plus I dont have a license. Our friend here may have fallen victim to Pixar just like the developers before… who knows.

There never was a license for BMRT, it was free. Use Google and you find the latst version, for Widows, as a archive.

  Beers, 

Moritz
#198

Thanks for the info, but I think you missed alot of what I was saying about Gelato, as well as Animal Logics plugin.

  1. I understand there is no license for BMRT, but there is however a license for MAXman, which I dont have, and cannot ever obtain. Upon install MAXman plainly states that without BMRT installed it will not operate. With that in mind, it is pretty plain to see that without BMRT MAXman doesnt work. And please keep in mind that these plugins have been off of the market for awhile now, and were taken off of the market before this current economic crisis was even in the sights.

Animal Logics plugin was removed from development most likely because one of its dependencies vanished, BMRT. I understand what there site says, but come on, 1+2 usually equals 3.

Regarding EXluna, I understand the case, and I think that Larry was completely innocent as he was completely prepared to fight the suit and win, at which time Pixar changed their mind and decided to sue the developers personally. Remember, Pixar was initially going to sue the company, and than changed their minds to sue the men individually when they began preperations to fight the case. That smells a bit fishy to me.

I have been doing alot of R and D with Gelato lately and it seems to run fine. I didnt mean that Gelato was “Renderman Compliant”, I meant it was obviously modelled after Renderman in many, if not most ways. It outputs PYG not RIB, and the shader language is entirely different, but regardless, the principles of design are present.

You seem to have had alot of experience, which is something that I still lack in many areas, and the productions that you have worked on most likely outscale mine by a long shot, so please remember that most likely our areas of usage for these tool will differ, and consequently the results and bugs that surface in certain software will be different. I havent encountered too many in Gelato except in the shadow mapping, so as of right now I am happy with it as an alternative to Renderman in Max, until I get the time, or the license for something that works better (like a plugin to connect Renderman to Max).

Anyhow, I hope that clears some things up concerning my statement regarding Pixar and the lawsuit.

  • Evan

By the way, was the 2005 film “Superman Returns” by chance?