Renderman

The Renderman Option



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One of Presenter's strong points is it's support for several different rendering output options:

VIDI's Ray Tracer and Phong Shader are progressing quite well. They are fast, easy to use, and produce high-quality results. The new QuickTime VR rendering mode is especially strong for creating virtual reality scenes and objects..

The other option, MacRenderman, is more challenging, but can often produce images that the other options cannot. Here are some of the advantages of using Renderman with Presenter:

Feature

Benefit

Surface Shaders

A surface shader is a little program than runs in Renderman to create a specific color surface. For example, a brick shader can be applied to a building to produce the brick and mortar textures in a tiled arragement. Most shaders calculate the surface mathematically, rather than using a picture as a texture map. This often improves the image quality and adds a variety of effects to the surface.

Dozens of shaders are available on the Internet that can be used in Presenter. The adventurous user can write new shaders for use with Presenter and Renderman. Writing a shader is similar to programming in the C language.

Displacement Shaders

A displacement shader is similar to a surface shader, but instead of setting the surface color, it alters the geometry of the surface. On a brick surface, a displacement shader could place indentations in the mortar areas between the bricks to give the wall some thickness. This is much more efficient than modeling each brick!

Texture Mapping

Renderman has powerful texture mapping capabilities, and new shaders can be designed to create unique effects.

Great Image Quality

It's a question of personal preference, but I think Renderman produces the best-looking results.

Availability of Resources

There are some excellent sites devoted to Renderman on the Internet. Several World Wide Web sites have tutorials and shaders available, and there is a USENET newsgroup, comp.graphics.rendering.renderman, where expert advice is available on a wide variety of Renderman topics.

Control and Flexibility

Presenter allows a large set of MacRenderman controls to be set. You can vary the rendering speed and image quality for each object. Several rendering filters are available to sharpen or smooth the output. Presenter has fields for the user to insert custom geometry statements to Renderman. Presenter has an option to produce the Renderman geometry as a text file (called a RIB file). It can be reviewed and changed for troubleshooting purposes or to create custom effects.

Boolean Operations for Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG)

Presenter's interface to Renderman allows complex objects to be form by combining and carving out simple objects. The Boolean operations are Union, Intersection and Difference. Although Modeler has a similar function, it modifies the geometry of the objects immediately. The Renderman method does not show the effect of the Boolean operation until the image is actually rendered. This allows the objects to be manipulated to create different effects in each frame.

There are some disadvantages too:

 


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