material shaders
Anthony Rosbottom
Hopefully this year I'm going to get time to try and use this Blender to Renderman pipeline.
I'm thinking ahead to surface/material shaders and am wondering a couple of things.
Firstly, I haven't spent hours looking but even so, I haven't found a good ribspec shader repository?
The 'renderman shaders' link on the BtoR page goes to renderman.org which now seems to be a dead link?
If I'm going to be controlling the 'look' of my shaders with bitmap textures as opposed to procedural textures, is the default shader from mosaic ( converted from Blender) good enough?
I'm currently on windows (I know Boo Hiss!) what's the best shader editor on the windows platform? I heard that there was a good one recently but there were no windows builds of it.
If I do bite the bullet and get linux installed, what's the best distribution for Blender and the OS Renderman tools? Is Animux a good (and easy to install) option?
Sorry for the amount of questions there guys.
Cheers,
Anthony Rosbottom
www.bliz.co.uk
T G
Yes renderman.org has recently been dead, just in the past few weeks
or so and that really sucks because there was quite a bit of
information on it. In fact this site was the first one I really found
years ago that helped me out getting into Renderman so to see it go is
sad. Sadly though there is no rsl repository on the web like that
found on renderman.org, HOWEVER because I had enough forsight to save
all the shaders I might set one up myself, not to mention that this
was added to Animux too. As it is there will be changes to the website
and I might add a shader repo, somehow lol.
The default Mosaic surface shader was written to handle the
complexities of Blender's texture mapping, in fact I use it more for
texture mapping than I do for shading objects. So if you wanted to use
texture maps it would be very wise. Just remember that only TIFF
texture maps work (I think EXR does too though) so don't use jpeg or
png or anything like that, and also remember that Blender does not get
rid of texture maps like it should even if they are "deleted" from the
scene, Blender keeps that data block in the file anyway (irritation I
might add) so if you by chance do happen to have a png file for
instance in the scene Mosaic will try to export it and you will get an
error message telling you that the texture optimizer could not convert
it. Not a big deal and does not cause problems at all but it is
something to be aware of.
Windows is not a big deal really, after all the BtoR project was to
try to make all this software work on all available platforms, however
it is a bit easier to compile software on Linux and many of the tools
we use were designed for Linux or have more development for it rather
than Windows. As for a shader editor there are three that come to mind
for Windows. Shaderman 0.7, Shaderman.NEXT and SLer. Shaderman 0.7 is
an exe so all you need to do is download the zip file and extract, set
it up to run either Aqsis or Pixie and you are pretty good to go. As
for Shaderman.Next and SLer, since they run on Python you NEED to
install the python libraries that these depend on but the websites do
have links to these exact packages so again all you would need to do
is download and install. Learning them is a whole different matter and
the best advise I have is to play around with them and see what you
can come up with. Reading up on RSL is also a good idea even when
using a GUI shader editor as the functioning part is the same as if
you were writing shader code by hand.
For Linux it is pretty much up to what you want to use. The reason for
Animux being so prominent on this site is not so much that it is any
better than say Ubuntu or openSuse, it was simply because I had helped
develop the Blender to Renderman pipeline for their most recent
release and MUCH of the work I had done was basicly to make sure that
the software ran right, was easy to access and that the idea of using
all open source tools to get from Blender to final frame output would
be flawless. This included making sure other software like Shaderman
and SLer would execute (including the required libraries), that
Cinepaint and OpenEXR could open any Renderman frames and even helped
design a script that would ensure proper Mosaic exported data
execution on a Dr.Queue renderfarm. I am still using it to this day,
mainly since I have doe a lot of work on my own to set it up the way I
want. Does this mean that Animux is better? No. In fact with enough
work all the software can be added to any Linux OS, however Animux was
designed for 3D animation in mind and they really wanted to get
Blender to Renderman on it. Go with what you are comfortable with, be
it Ubuntu, AVLinux, Animux whatever. Just also bear in mind that in
this year several software were upgraded so already Aqsis is old in
most repositories, as well as Mosaic on Animux which at the time was
0.3.1 and we are already at 0.4.7 so right away you will need to
upgrade your packages and in Linux it really is not hard to do.
Hope this helps!
Cheers!
Ted
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>WHiTeRaBBiT<
they are tightly integrated with Blender (not all features but a lot),
here's what's translated http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/ribmosaic/2009/11/28/mosaic-2-5-7-release-notes/.
Also MOSAIC's shaders are a good place to learn when writing your own
as they have nearly every technique you'll find out there in one
place. I think I should mention that MOSAIC comes with over 300
shaders that are a collection from k3D, renderman.org and few other
places (most people forget they are there because they download
mosaic.py directly and don't use CVS). There's also the K3D project
that maintains a very large list of shaders, and 3Delight has quite a
few (each renderer usually comes with a few). Beyond that I'd say just
google, you'll find small collections of shaders all over the internet
usually from experiments or technical papers.
The shader editors Ted mentioned are the ones I know about too
although I strong recommend Shrimp2 if your able to compile on Liinux
http://sourceforge.net/projects/shrimp/develop.
For Linux everyone has very strong personal feelings about their
favorite distros so it depends on who you ask. I prefer Debian as I
like the package management, proper root account setup and the fact
that it's not already setup for me (but then again I'm a developer and
like to tweak things myself). I think for Linux noobs or people a
little scared to setup things themselves Ubuntu is the way to go. I
would download a few live cd's of the most popular distros and see
which ones seem to work best for you.
Another big factor is what hardware your trying to setup Linux on,
certain distros do a good job of being ready set for a wide range of
hardware but there's always a chance your rig will be the one that
doesn't work no matter what! I've personally never had a rig that
wouldn't work but I'm not scared to find, compile and install drivers
or even recompile the kernel if necessary.
Eric Back (WHiTeRaBBiT)
On Jan 14, 9:59 am, Anthony Rosbottom <anthony.rosbot...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Anthony Rosbottom
I'll sift through the info properly after work but in the meantime there's a couple of questions off the top of my head
I already use TIFF files for my mental ray work but I use a lot of layered tifs because mental ray doesn't like psd files. Does mosaic support layered TIFFs alongside flat TIFs?
Also, I notice on the animux site that the 'genesis' version is available but that a new, more comprehensive version is in the works. Do you two have any inside info on when the next version will be out. If I install the current 'genesis' version now do you think it will be trivial to upgrade to the newer one?
And sorry, this is a basic 'n00b' linux question. If I use either a live CD distro or dedicate a USB key to have the live version of animux on it, will I still be able to see [mount?] my other FAT32 hard drives and use them in the normal way (load and save files etc.)?
Cheers,
Anthony Rosbottom
www.bliz.co.uk
mohan
the linux distribution.
just jump in and see the taste of renderman..
>WHiTeRaBBiT<
display drivers and shadeop parameters in the shaders and is at the
discretion of each renderer. I don't remember seeing layered tiffs in
any of the renderer's docs but I may of missed something. Even if none
of them do you could ask the developers for this feature and someone
may add it (such as the Aqsis team adding Blender style layered
exr's) ;) As far as MOSAIC goes almost anything is possible but you
would need to learn a little RIB and RSL code to plug it in yourself,
that's the power and draw backs of RenderMan.
Don't know anything about Animux, that's Ted's territory I think.
You can mount and use partitions in formats supported by the livecd
your using. This implies some distros come bundled for utility work
and have a wide range of support where others are just meant to
demonstrate their desktops (although most let you add components if
online). For instance I regularly use Knoppix to diagnose and fix
hardware and software issues for a wide variety of OS's, you'll find
that windoze feels like a toy after learning Linux :)
Eric Back (WHiTeRaBBiT)
On Jan 15, 6:01 am, Anthony Rosbottom <anthony.rosbot...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Chris Foster
<anthony....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the lengthy replies Ted and Eric.
>
> I'll sift through the info properly after work but in the meantime there's a
> couple of questions off the top of my head
>
> I already use TIFF files for my mental ray work but I use a lot of layered
> tifs because mental ray doesn't like psd files. Does mosaic support layered
> TIFFs alongside flat TIFs?
By layered TIFFs I assume you mean a TIFF with multiple sub-images...
Typically renderers actually use such multi-image TIFF files internally for
mipmapping (ie, the output of the texture optimizer). That means
you can't really use such files for input textures without flattening them into
a single sub-image.
Which features does having layered TIFFs enable? As Eric said, aqsis already
supports multi-layered EXRs for output, so maybe that's what you want? In many
ways OpenEXR is a more convenient format for this kind of thing, since it's
quite a lot more flexible, for instance it natively supports naming of image
channels.
~Chris
Anthony Rosbottom
I'm using layered tiffs as a substitute for photoshop psd files because mental ray doesn't like psd files.
The layered tiffs let you do all the different layer blending modes that the psd files do si I thought it would be a good 'master' format for textures that would work in any renderer.
This is where I'm at with my current model
http://www.bliz.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/images/cannon16b.jpg
(rendered with mental ray at the moment)
If you notice the bare wood, the scuffed lead paint and the black scratches are all on different layers in the tiff files
I'll have to see if Aqsis & Pixie supports layered tiffs. I've just this minute installed 3Delight for Maya (just to get some dirty quick renderman going) and it seems to handle the layered tiffs fine (though the lack of proper lighting made it hard to be 100% sure).
Using OpenEXR sounds interesting. I'll need to install openexr and give it a go.
Cheers,
Anthony Rosbottom
www.bliz.co.uk