3ds and Renderman
16 messages in this thread
Congratulations! It sounds that 3dsr2 is another "great step for mankind".
However, I'm missing a RIB export facility. I generally miss one that
supports all the special features of Renderman like real spheres,
cylinders, cones, bicubic patches, displacement mapping, window and
slide-projector-like lights, only to name a few, and I expected that 3ds
would be the first one that does. On the other hand, with all the new
features of r2 in mind, especially the possibility of attaching external
procedures to objects (have I understood it correctly?): I'm wondering who
of us really needs a Renderman interface any more. I presume we can expect
a lot of add-ons soon, doing all the things I mentioned above and more.
Hoping we can find a few in this forum.
Greetings
-nt-
Ooops. I forgot to mention that we've finished a 3DS-to-RIB converter, and
we'll be uploaded that here to the forum and sending it out to dealers.
It'll be up sometime in April, after we finish QA'ing it.
You're correct in your assumption that, due to our procedural texture
capability (via IPAS), there is very little need for Rman anymore unless
you need atmospheric shaders or very wierd displacement effects, etc.
– G
Gary –
I assume there are some specifications available for people interested in
writing external procedures (IPAS). Is there someone in particular at
Autodesk whom I might contact in that regard?
– Larry
There sure are. We're putting together a Software Developers Kit with all
the source code for the 14 sample applications that ship with r2 and
documentation.
John Sergneri at Autodesk is responsible for this SDK. Please contact him
with questions.
– G
Gary –
Do you have a phone number for John Sergneri at Autodesk and/or a
Compuserve ID? I definitely want to get my hands on the Developer's Kit
when it's available.
I want to experiment "stretching" a selected set of vertices realtive to a
fixed set that they are attached to. Primarily to morph a single object
over a series of frames in the Keyframer without requiring a separate
object to morph to. Kind of a "rubbery", physical property kind of
thing. . . Have I gone off the deep end yet? Hmmmm, now where's that old
college Physics text? There must be some formula for this.
– Larry
John's number is 415/491/8534.
Your application would be very straightforward to implement under IPAS.
– G
Larry, Go for it!!! BTW I am using TAPCIS to access CIM works great much
faster,and will save you money!! Call me.
Regards
Steve
Steve –
Thanks for the tour the other day. Pretty impressive setup! And, yes I
will call you regarding TAPCIS. I tried out GRAFCAT, – works fine. It
will certainly help out organizing my files. Any word from Buck regarding
a "Users Group" meeting?
– Larry
Larry, Buck wants to host a meeting at his place in Burlington, but first
we need to do a mailing to all registered users,and see how many folks
would be interested. It wold be interesting to see how many are using CIS.
Regards
Steve
Cool!
Cheers, Tim at Alias-in-the-frozen-North
Yup… I'm sure that made you happy!
– G
Gary:
At NCGA, one of the ILM guys said that they *needed* surface patches
-hence, Alias and Renderman.
But I wonder – with enough RAM, tesselation might be more practical than
patches. What do you think?
Evan
That discussion could fill volumes and volumes.
Note that the ILM guys do NOT use Alias. That was a boondoggle perpetuated
by Alias. I've heard that ILM has been pretty PO'd at those folks, because
most of their work was done with Rman and proprietary software. For
example, almost no work on Abyss and T2 was done with Alias, but you'd
never know it from the ads. The word on the street is that ILM is now
moving over to SoftImage for their turnkey workstation stuff.
– G
displacement maps are VERY powerfull in what they can do for an animation i
would not call them weird but a nessesity for certain animations. a
definate short fall of rel 2. one of the reasons that digital arts is still
on my hard disk <g>
sherwood
powerful = unbelievably slow unless you've got a transputer
eh?
– G
no not really … running dgs on two 50 mhz computers. pretty fast actually
as hardware speed increases so does the rest of the stuff<g>
sherwood