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November 19, 2005
Impressions about RenderMan for Maya
Pixar just released RenderMan for Maya, a plugin to use RenderMan integrated to Maya.The first tests I saw in 2004 Siggraph, were very impressive. The company where I work was one of the first to enter in the beta program in may. Soon, we perceived that Pixar had a great product in hands.
The plug-in is very easy to use, totaly integrated to Maya, you just need to switch the render to RenderMan in Render Globals Window. You still render your images in Render View and creates your shaders in hypershade in the same way that you are used to in Maya. You don¢¥t have to learn new editors or tools.
RfM supports almost all shading nodes from Maya and you still can program your shaders using the RSL shading language. All existent shaders for RenderMan are compatible with RfM. If you have Slim it¢¥s just a matter of compile the shader and load it in RfM; the compatibility is total.
Using RfM, the artist have a very robust render that can calculate global illumination, color bleeding and occlusion, besides all Pixar¡¯s patented algorithms as motion blur and deep shadows.
If you are used to work with NURBS surfaces, you can forget all the tesselation problems as RfM is a true nurbs renderer. If you work with subdivision surfaces RfM renders in a more efficient way than Maya¢¥s native render. This velocity was expected, as Pixar was the first company to implement subdivision surfaces. RfM, has a better memory management than other renders, so it can process heavier scenes.
We are using the plugin in production since june. Some scenes from ¡°Claro Chuva¡± film, others from ¡°Tim Festival 2005¡± and all the scenes from ¡°Natura Vegetalização¡± (the images from this post are 2 moments of this film) were rendered using this new software.
As we work very closely with Pixar in the beta period, one of my conversations with the guys about all the changes that we were doing in our pipeline was utilized in a plugin launching press release.
More Review -> Click!!!
Posted by administrator at November 19, 2005 11:18 AM
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