3DS to RIB Conversion
2 messages in this thread
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.
Those are good tips; it sounds like you're experienced with this. At
Syndesis, we rarely get requests to convert Renderman files. I think too
many people think it's some kind of universal nice file format, like any
other 3D object from other programs. I try to explain that it's more like
PostScript and EPS. If you've got other tips or thoughts about this, I'd
love to hear them. Someday, we may add a RIB-output converter to our line
of translators, and we'd most probably work only with polygons.