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From: "Holman, Dimitri" <dholman@wb.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <lightwave@garcia.com>
Subject: FW: was games:/J-park/Renderman/Softimage/Alias
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Status: RO
X-Status:
I really wish NewTek woulld replace the VRML export function with somthing
useful like the chap from pixar mentioned to my post to the plugin list.
Dimitri Holman writes:
> I could have sworn Pixar's Renderman
> was used for the Final Rendering to Film
> for Jurassic Park.
..yes, a minor fact completely ignored by all promotional materials
from SoftImage and Alias :) . Also Apollo 13, T2, and many many many
others -- basically anything from ILM, Digital Domain, Metrolight, etc
etc etc. The reasons are broad and highly technical. One major one is
programmability, another is good performance with VERY complex scenes
(millions of primitives per frame), and another could be hinted at by
the fact that Toy Story was rendered at merely ~1500 lines resolution.
Too bad I can't tell you what's coming up soon from the RenderMan
team, but when it's ready it will be available for ALL customers, not
just a select few at Pixar.
Modeler-RIB and Layout-RIB plugins are tremendously easy to do. A GOOD
one would be only slightly harder, and have a lot of options -- polys
or bilinear patches? Polys or analytic surfaces? Shading params?
Identifiers? Inline hints and comments? Instantiation with the
RiObject mechanism, or inline expansion? Full scene or RIB Entity
File?
One thing to consider too might be the intelligent replacement
of the polygonal objects use in Layout with higher-detailed or
analytic-surface models at RIB conversion time. I've done this a lot
when working with RMan coupled to Wavefront or the dreaded 3DS. I
animate using the simple poly representation, extract the animation
data from the scene description and render using the fancy patch
model (using RMaster -- http://www.rahul.net/natpix/) [At Pixar, the
animation system lets you store such multiple levels of detail in
