Renderman

Hoping others will add to this... I'd like this section to stay focused on renderman as it relates to maya, there's several sites already for pure renderman. Here's some links to a few:

• rendermania - http://www.rendermania.com/
• renderman repository - http://www.renderman.org/
• shaderman - http://www.dream.com.ua/thetool.html

choices for renderman renderers

• prman https://renderman.pixar.com/
• aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com/
• pixie - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~okan/Pixie/pixie.htm
• 3delight - http://www.3delight.com/
• air - http://www.sitexgraphics.com/index.html
• jig - http://www.steamboat-software.com/jigwhat.html

ribgen tools

• mtor - https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/mtor.html
• liquid - http://sourceforge.net/projects/liquidmaya/ - massive update, well worth a look!
• mayaman - http://www.animallogic.com/research/mayaman/
• renderman for maya - https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/rfm_webinfopage.html
• 3delight for maya - http://www.3delight.com

Pre Render Scripts

What they mean is not really a script, as much as a function. I have just done a render where i want to pRef from a deformed object, but not include all the deformers. Basically i have a blendshape that then is deformed by bones. Now i want to pRef the original blendshape, after the bone deformation, and then render the other blend shape with the bone deformation on there. So i wrote a quick script to do all this,and put that in the pre frame field in mtor... no use... it didnt work. So i saved the script in a file and sourced that from the pre frame script field, and by magic, it works!! ahhh nice.

setting pRef from mel

Just a simple one...

MtorPrefFreeze;

-- PeterHartwig? - 30 Mar 2005

Matte ribBox

Create a ribBox and add this to make it be matted from the beauty but not the other passes (such as shadow...)

[if { $ELEMENTTYPE == "final" } {return "Matte 1"} else { return "Matte 0" } ]

readarchives and 3delight

3delight doesn't have an archve writer at present, so looks like some massaging is required. here's what i've found so far:

• as per the forum instructions, choose your proxy object, add a geo attrib. turn off 'output geometry', and in pre geo mel add 'rireadacrhive -an "myRib.rib";
• to create the archive itself, set your output to rib, export the geo
• text edit the rib, delete the attribute nodes you don't need, the camera, the matching frame blocks and worldbegin/end blocks
• change each 'transform' reference to 'concattransform', otherwise they won't be parented to your proxy
• for the moment i'm manually editing the object indicies so they don't conflict with whats in your scene. Clearly there's a better method than this.
• from looking at a archive export from prman, looks like you insert into the innermost attribute block a resourcebegin/resourceend. I had problems with maya crashing before, seems to be happier now.