CompuServe Messages

There are many ways to speed up point/polygon rendering in RenderMan, it's just that most people who write RIB stuff don't do the Right Things ~ partially due to the lack of many of the more esoteric RenderMan controls in model and scene conversion software. For example, it's still pretty rare to see a RIB output unit that understands that shading rate is a primitive attribute, not a global scene attribute, or that polygons should be sperated into Polygons and GeneralPolygons — most commercial converters I've seen just spit out GPolys and take a performance hit, or spit out Polys and render things wrong. RIB conversions LOOKS easy on the surface — but high-performance conversion, like high-performance anything, requires a deeper understanding than most converter-writers seem to have.