billr@truevision.com (Bill Romanowski) (01/08/91)
In an attempt to correct some of the mis-info posted about my pal (and yours) RenderMan.... - WireMan?? -- cute name but no such animal you mean VectorMan ... a Pixar preview renderer that displays a rib (render(man?) interface bytestream) file in wireframe for previews. There was some mention of real-time vs. not... I've not yet seen an Interactive real-time RenderMan (or even close to it). I have seen many implementions of the renderer that are quite far from real-time ...MacRenderMan comes to mind... The new product from Pixar for the Mac is ShowPlace. Neat Program,beautiful..everything you want in a modeler except modeling... Autodesk's 3DStudio does not (in this 1.0 release i have) use RenderMan in any way. 3DS uses it's own renderer (a pretty ok one..not much faster that RMan on an equal machine). Maybe we'll see rib file out from 3DS in the future. Cool but somewhat VGA-ISH product. If you want RenderMan from Autodesk you want the AutoShade(2?) product. AutoShade takes one "scene" from Autocad and produces a .rib file which you can then render the frame on your 386/486 with Pixar's "PhotoRealistic RenderMan" (included with Autoshade). You can also get 386/486 "PhotoRealistic RenderMan" bundled with FastCad3D from Evolution Technologies (Tempe AZ.) a nice NURB-ish modeler at a good price. Pixar will sell you developers RenderMan for 386/486 for ~$2500.00 or for sparc or sgi or others for a bit more (or not) and you may then be entitled to talk to Dr. Bill which is in itself a $2500 value). Developers RenderMan means renderer,shader compiler,file utilities,the mysterious linkable renderer, tutorials and documentation. You get about the same thing in Autoshade and FastCad3D 'cept tutorials,libraries and in-depth doc's. but I know what you REALLY want to run PhotoRealistic RenderMan .... I've got one right here but that would be not-nice-net-manners to talk about it in public so I won't. Bill Romanowski code mule