unland@cbmvax.UUCP (Rick Unland REGIONAL) (05/29/89)
A little while back I remember reading a thread about the Renderman specs. I would appreaciate information about how to obtain these. Please Email me if you have information about who all is implementing this spec in the 3D Broadcast community. Thanks in advance.
seanc@pro-party.cts.com (Sean Cunningham) (05/30/90)
I hope that some software developer decides to produce a RenderMan interface compatible product...not just generating RIB (Renderman Interface Bytestream) files, but an actual renderer, supporting the shading language, and other effects that go with it. Alot of the packages we have now support texture mapping of IFFs, but I'd like to see procedural texture-mapping, which is faster, and user definable. Sculpt/Animate 4D supports motion-blur somewhat, but the effect isn't as nice as I've seen in Pixar animations. And the one effect that none of the packages for the Amiga have is depth of field, wher stuff closer, or farther from the camera goes out of focus. I just got some info from a company making a RenderMan interface for the Mac, and even have a render accelerator board using the i860 RISC processor...price, about $3795...with the board. Not too bad when you consider the cost of Caligari, and the supporting hardware you'll need to generate nice images. This is an area where Marc Bennett's MC88000 RISC board might come in handy...not as a peripheral that would directly speed up the Amiga, but one where complex graphics procedures could be off-loaded. Maybe one of these days... Sean //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// UUCP: ...!crash!pnet01!pro-party!seanc | ARPA: !crash!pnet01!pro-party!seanc@nosc.mil | " Fanatics have their INET: seanc@pro-party.cts.com | dreams, wherewith they | weave a paradise for RealWorld: Sean Cunningham | a sect. " Voice: (512) 994-1602 PLINK: ce3k* | -Keats | Call C.B.A.U.G. BBS (512) 883-8351 w/SkyPix | B^) VISION GRAPHICS B^) \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
prem@geomag.fsu.edu (Prem Subrahmanyam) (05/30/90)
In article <2893@crash.cts.com> seanc@pro-party.cts.com (Sean Cunningham) writes: >as I've seen in Pixar animations. And the one effect that none of the >packages for the Amiga have is depth of field, wher stuff closer, or farther >from the camera goes out of focus. Actually, no _commercial_ Amiga renderer supports variable depth of field, however, the _public domain_ ray-tracer, DBW_Render, does support this, plus a whole lot more nice features, like fractals, procedural marble/ wood/mottling textures, etc. The only problem with DBW right now is the lack of a decent user interface--I'm trying to design a Modeler3d to DBW converter as we speak. ---Prem Subrahmanyam
menzies@altitude.CAM.ORG (Stephen Menzies) (06/01/90)
seanc@pro-party.cts.com (Sean Cunningham) writes: > >Alot of the packages we have now support texture mapping of IFFs, but I'd like >to see procedural texture-mapping, which is faster, and user definable. You might check out Impulse's TurboSilverSV. It already has several procedural textures - angular, bricks, checks, disturbed (produces a bump map), grid, layers, marble and wood. They render in fast solid model and raytrace. Personally , I look forward to topographical bump mapping - bump maps that are produced by reading the gray scale of an image. Simply put, a digitized texture can be mapped with some depth in it. The map cannot throw a shadow (that's displacement mapping) but it will take specular hits - in 24 bit this is a necessity , otherwise everything is plastic. > >Sean -- Stephen Menzies email: menzies@altitude.CAM.ORG
phorgan@cup.portal.com (Patrick John Horgan) (06/27/90)
The Renderman specs are available directly from Pixar. I was just starting to port (actually write from the specs) Renderman to the Amiga months ago when someone posted to the net saying that theirs was almost done. Does anyone have any status on this? Patrick Horgan phorgan@cup.portal.com
johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch) (06/28/90)
In article <7850@lynx.UUCP> vik@lynx.UUCP (Vikram Sohal) writes: >I read somewhere that Pixar has ported their RenderMan Computer Animation >package to work on systems other than their own. Any chance there this has >been ported to the Amiga? If not, which systems is it available on? It has been ported to the Apple Macinto$h for one. They sell a back end that you use with any one of several 3D editors to produce files which you can feed to their program for rendering. I don't think it will act as a general programming platform though so you can't actually write C programs which interface with it (take this sentence with salt, it is only an impression). I took the opportunity to ask a guy in the Pixar booth at Siggraph last year about an Amiga port and he responded that some of the people at Pixar had Amigas so there had been some talk about it but there wasn't one planned. He then went on to explain to me (like I was some kind of idiot) that RenderMan tended to be very computationally intensive ("no, kidding") and he wasn't sure how well the Amiga would do as a platform! This was in a booth where they had RenderMan running on that trained ape of a computer, the IBM PC AT and they had the RenderMan demo (which renders a pencil with attributes you select) running on the Mac II. I didn't take the moron by the collar and shake him but I actively considered it. I did however explain that anything the Mac II could do I could do much better on my machine at home. >I saw a book in my local computer bookstore describing how to use RenderMan >as well as a description of its interface. I'm not sure exactly, but I >think the book is called the "The RenderMan Companion". Yup, good book. Considerably better than Pixar's own RenderMan specification. John Munsch | A graphics person trapped doing Lan work. :-<