H O P P E R P E D I A ©
-Brian Hammons
Pixar’s Renderman for Maya is a proprietary photorealistic renderer plug-in that produces high-quality visual effects and animation. A main goal of Renderman is to provide compatibility between itself and other modeling programs.
RenderMan for Maya is designed to be completely integrated with the Maya high-end 3D computer graphics software package. RenderMan takes all your Maya scene data — Maya Materials, lights, geometry, Maya Fur, particles, Maya Hair, et cetera — and renders them with Pixar's RenderMan. Simply select “RenderMan” from the 'Render using' menu and your image will appear in the Maya 'Render View' window. Get the same production-quality motion blur and displacements, ambient occlusion, 3D caching and baking, not to mention the legendary power, speed, and stability of Pixar's RenderMan, right there in the Maya UI.
Capability Examples:• Multithreading
• Motion blur
• Displacements
• Fur and Hair
• Secondary outputs for easy compositing
• "Deep Shadow" technology
• Subsurface scattering
• Point based ambient occlusion and global illumination
• HDRI and image based lighting effects
• Texture baking
• Camera effects, including bokeh and shutter timing
• Photon based caustics
• Render time CSG boolean operations
• Production statistics
Required capabilitiesFor a renderer, in order to call itself "RenderMan-compliant", it must implement at least the following capabilities:
• A complete hierarchical graphics state, including the attribute and transformation stacks and the active light list
• Orthographic and perspective viewing transformations
• Depth-based hidden-surface elimination
• Pixel filtering and anti-aliasing
• Gamma correction and dithering before quantization
• Output of images containing any combination of RGB, A, and Z. The resolutions of these files must be as specified by the user
• All of the geometric primitives described in the specification, and provide all of the standard primitive variables applicable to each primitive
• The ability to perform shading calculations through user-programmable shading
• The ability to index texture maps, environment maps, and shadow depth maps
• The fifteen standard light source, surface, volume, displacement, and imager shaders required by the specification. Any additional shaders, and any deviations from the standard shaders presented in this specification, must be documented by providing the equivalent shader expressed in the RenderMan shading language
Programming Language behind Renderman• Extensibility
Renderman Shading Language (abbreviated RSL) is a component of the RenderMan Interface Specification, and is used to define shaders. The language syntax is C-like. A shader written in RSL can be used without changes on any RenderMan-compliant renderer, such as Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan, DNA Research's 3Delight, Sitexgraphics' Air or an open source solution such as Pixie or Aqsis. RenderMan Shading Language defines standalone functions and five types of shaders: surface, light, volume, imager and displacement shaders.
Shaders do the work by reading and writing special variables such as Cs (surface color), N (normal at given point), and Ci (final surface color). The arguments to the shaders are global parameters that are attached to objects of the model (so one metal shader can be used for different metals and so on). Shaders have no return values, but functions can be defined which take arguments and return a value
Shader Applications: Surface shaders -Surface shaders are attached to geometry. These shaders describe optical properties of geometric object. Simply said, Surface shaders tells the renderer what will the surface look like when it is hit by the light. Consider this shader, as the one that describes what will the object look like
Displacement shaders - These shaders change the topology of the surface. In order to change the topology, Displacement shader can do one of two things. It can do REAL displacement, which moves the actual geometry, or it can move the surface normals, which produce the infamous BUMP effect. These shaders are also attached to the geometry.
Volume shaders - Volume shader changes the color of the light ray as it travels through volume. Volume can be one of several things. For one, it can be geometry. If light ray travels through geometry and it has volume shader attached, this shader will modulate light ray's color in a way you've described in shader. Secondly, volume can be light item. This means that you can have, for example, Spot Light's cone represent the volume through which light ray's will be modulated by a volume shader (volumetric lights). As for the third type of volume, if volume shader isn't attached to anything, it will be considered as atmospheric volume shader. Consider fog, myst and similar effects.
Light shaders - This shader represents the light source. With light shader you describe the emission of light rays from the source (item that has the light shader attached) to the destination point, which is the surface being illuminated. These shaders generally give control over light color, shadows, intensity, falloff with distance, barn doors etc. Light shaders are shaders with which you control light sources. Important to note is that light source to which this shader can be attached to is either light item or geometry.
Imager Shaders - Imager shaders operate on image just prior to the final output. When renderer is finished with calculating pixel colors for the image output, this shader operates on these pixels. Look at this kind of shaders as MAX Render Effects. It's a post-process shader, but with access to scene data (just like MAX Render Effects).
Price for Renderman for Maya 2011 3.0 (Node-locked)standalone software: US $ $995.00 SRP
License transfer relocation fee:
Transfers of your RenderMan for Maya license to another machine and/or platform are available. Full instructions will be provided upon purchase. A RenderMan for Maya License Transfer includes:
•One transfer of your license to another designated machine and/or platform.
•Transfers to either OS X, Windows XP, or Windows 7 permitted.
•Price applies to either node-locked or floating license server transfers.
