All rendered with 3delight and exported from blender with my self-written renderman exporter.

And the chair is just a very simple object with a self-made renderman shader.

1Mio Particles, lit with just one Spot Light with DSM. The shader is just the basic clay shader that ships with 3delight.

and with far too much post processing

Just tried a recent revision of the BMesh branch – the new polygon mesh system for blender which finally supports NGONS !!

It is still very buggy that’s why I’m happy to show this piece of work which was created in something inbetween 1 and 2 hours from a cube without a single crash!

The easiest way to set up a preview pass is to just create another render pass with the same settings as your main pass (that’s a bit cumbersome, the “copy pass” operator is on its way)

but lower the resolution,

the Pixel Samples,

max trace depth, photon count, etc. and in the world TAB activate “override ShadingRate” and raise that way up.

If you have Light Shaders or surface shaders with expensive raytrace shadeops you may even add an extra pass to them as well and link the new pass to your preview render pass and then lower the samples settings for your shaders.

The last thing you need to do is in the “Render” Panel in the render TAB disable “Export All Passes”.

Now you can easily switch between your preview pass to get a fast approximation and the beauty pass to render the full blown high resolution version over night

Have fun!

1. Renderengine Presets

Although the script ships with several renderengine presets I highly recommend you to read this article so that you’ll be able to customize the presets to your needs and find out about errors in the presets (though I hope there won’t be any but who knows ) and fix them yourself.

The most basic Preset is obviously the Render Engine Preset. You can set nearly everything related to this in the “Renderman Settings” Panel in the “Render”  TAB of you properties window. The only values stored in this preset that are not available in this Panel are the default values for the Attributes/Options you create in this Panel. How to choose the default values for them is described in the 3. part about Attribute Presets.

This Panel is divided into several sub panels:

• Basic Settings:

Here you can define the executables of your Render Engine as well as  file extensions and the path to your display drivers. The correct path to the display drivers folder is not necessary but useful as it makes browsing through a list of all the display drivers supported by the engine possible. You can still manually type in the display driver you want to output your image to if you didn’t specify a folder or the desired display driver is not showing up in the list (e.g. Pixie’s “shadow” and “tsm”  display drivers are hard coded and hence won’t show up though they’ll work).

If you’re Renderengine adds environment variables to your system, make sure to specify the path to the display drivers folder with $ENVNAME/<display-driver folder>, this will ensure that your preset is going to be system independent. (example: “$PIXIEHOME/displays”)

the “identifier” specifies a prefix or suffix that has to be part of the filename to be recognized as a display driver.

• Hider and Hider Options:

In this sub panel you can specify which Hiders the Renderman Compliant Render Engine you’re using supports and add options to them.

This (+) and (-) icon adds or removes to/from the list of hiders.

Below the list you can set the name of the hider, set it as default (the hider that will be chosen when you add a new Render Pass).

To add an option to the selected hider click on the (+) icon beside the field where you add a name. A new line is created with a Text Field, a menu and a (-) button. The (-) button is obviously to remove this option from your hider. The text field specifies the name of the option and the menu the type. If you choose “Float” or “Integer” you get another property where you can specify the option to be an array of a size of max. 3.

• Options/Attributes:

These sub panels manage the Options/Attributes your Render Engine supports. They work the same as the “Hider and Hider Options” sub panels except for the Attributes sub panel: When you choose your attribute to be of type “String” you get another menu where you can choose the input type. You can choose it to be plain text, a texture or a file output from a display driver.

IMPORTANT: Your options/attributes all have to have different names! If your render engine has several options/attributes with the same name that only differ in their type, add “[]” to the name with a number in it (in fact it doesn’t matter what you put in them, just make sure to add them),

e.g.: “visibility” -> “transmission[1]” of type “Integer” and “visibility” -> “transmission[2]” of type “String”.

• Shader Paths:

Here you can add paths where the exporter has to look for shaders. If there are a lot of shaders in that folder it may take several seconds as the script will examine every shader to find out what type of shader it is. NOTE: CO-Shaders are not yet supported.

if you want to take sub folders into consideration check the “Recursive” check box. This will automatically add the sub folders to the List as well.

The shader paths list also supports environment variables so make sure to use them to keep you settings system independent.

• Output Folders:

This sub panel holds settings for the sub folders where the exporter should put data to. The “Texture Maps” folder is for textures, that are processed by renderman’s image processing tool. In the textures Tab you can choose your texture files to be converted into rendermans native mip-mapped file format on export. This is the folder where the converted files will be saved to.

The “Bakefiles” folder is for files that are created by the renderengine during rendering. Either by your shaders (PTC Files, etc.) or photon maps, irradiance caches, etc. You can assign a bakefile to every string parameter by changing it’s input type to “Texture” and choosing a texture of the type “bakefile”. The bakefile is basically just a file path but easier to use with several render passes than manually copying and pasting the file path/name.

The “Frame Padding” option is the same as in other applications. It specifies the number of digits to use for the frame number. Frame numbers are automatically added to file names if you specify a “[frame]” in the name.

• Custom Driver Options

This is again the same as Hiders/Attributes and Options except it associates options with the display drivers. For example Aqsis has an extra option “Layername” for EXR display drivers to put several images into one file. Obviously for this to work properly the file names for all displays that you want to have in one file mustn’t differ!

2. Render Pass Presets:

A Render Pass Preset includes all information that is part of a render pass. The properties that belong to a render pass are all properties that are visible in the “Render” and “World” TAB of the Properties window except everything above the “Renderman  Passes” Panel in the “Render” Tab.

To save a render pass preset just click on the (+) menu next to the list in the “Renderman Passes” Panel and choose “Save Preset”.

In the pop up choose a sub folder and a name for your preset and click “Write Preset”.

This creates a new Render Pass Preset in a sub folder of the renderman preset directory with the name of the currently selected render engine preset e.g. “/scripts/presets/renderman/pixie/PTC/bake_occlusion.pass”.

To load a Render Pass Preset there are two different ways. One is to directly add a new render pass and instead of choosing “New” choose the desired preset.

The other way is to let a shader parameter “request” the render pass. This is done by clicking on the menu button next to a shader parameter of type “String” and choosing the pass preset.

If the preset pass has got more than one output display you also have to choose the desired display to be attached to the string parameter. This way all objects that have the material this shader is attached to will request and therefor add a render pass with the chosen preset.

The most important usage of this system is to attach shadowmap passes to lights because each time you copy your light you’ve requested a shadow map pass for a new shadow map pass will be created and of course each time you delete the light, it’ll remove the shadow map pass and this obviously is what you want.

This may sound complicated but in fact it is as easy to use as adding a shadow map to a light in any other render engine. Remember that once you’ve created your shadow map pass preset you just have to select the lamp, choose a light shader that accepts shadow maps and request a shadow map pass for it.

The benefit of this system is that you can modify/adjust all parts of your passes without the need to modify RIBs by hand and therefor  it makes all the flexibility Renderman offers available while keeping things as fast and easy to use as possible.

3. Attribute Presets:

The last preset type is for attributes. It allows you to group combinations of attributes that are often needed to reuse them fast and easy. For example if you want to bake data to a point cloud or bake a photon map for global illumination you have to tell the renderer to split your geometry independent of the camera and not to hide geometry that is not visible. This is usually done by setting 3 attributes:

Attribute “cull” “hidden” [0]

Attribute “cull” “backfacing” [0]

and

Attribute “dice” “rasterorient” [0]

If you know you’ll need these attributes most of the time with exactly these values in these combination it is a lot easier to save them to an attribute preset.

First you need to attach the attributes to the geometry or if you know that all objects need the same value for the attribute, attach it to the world. To do this click on the (+) menu button at the top of the “Attributes” Panel either in the World Tab, in the Object Tab or in the Light Tab.

Then choose “New Attribute” -> the group the attribute belongs to  –> and finally the attribute itself.

Now you’ve got a new attribute group attached to this object. If you expand it, you’ll see the attribute you’ve chosen. By clicking on the menu on the right you can get and set default values for the atribute/group, disable the export for them and remove them completely.

The default values you choose here will be saved with the Render Engine preset (including the “export” flag).

Now that you’ve added a bunch of attributes to the object you can click on the (+) menu and choose “save preset”, choose, which attributes to be included in the preset, give it a name and click “OK”.

Note: excluding the group will also exclude all attributes in that group (Pop Ups are only drawn once so no way to visualize that)

To load an Attribute Preset click on the (+) sign and choose the preset from the menu “Presets”.

You can also add single Attributes or Attribute Presets to all selected objects with the Object Specials Menu.

To do that with your objects selected hit “W” and choose “Renderman” -> “Attributes” -> etc.

That’s it about Presets in my little Blender 2.5 -> Renderman exporter. I hope it makes sense and you’ll find it easy and pleasent to use.

If you have any ideas to improve the usability or see that something is broken/not working as it is supposed to, leave a comment (wouldn’t recommend that as the comment system is broken atm -.-), send me an email or post an issue on the github repository.

You can also access me at #blendercoders, #blenderpython and #aqsis. I’m often hanging around there so don’t hesitate to ask if anything goes wrong.

Cheers,

frigge

check out their blog for more information about the project.

The project URL is: http://github.com/frigge/Blender-to-Renderman/
Checkout the source via: git://github.com/frigge/Blender-to-Renderman.git

Meanwhile i’ve also fixed a bug causing the exporter to not work properly on windows (stupid backslashes ).

Important Note: I think I forgot to mention: Don’t hit F12 to render your scene. This will result in a crash (because of a tiny bug i didn’t fix) but this is not what you want!
Instead click on “Render” in Blender’s Render Tab. This will trigger another operator and will work. Same thing for Animations.

And of course: If you stumble upon a bug. Don’t just give up but please ask me either by leaving a comment, sending an email, PM on Blenderartists.org, #blendercoders, #blenderpython, #aqsis on IRC Freenode, comment on the github repo, ICQ or whatever. This way it’s far easier for me to spot bugs and make the script usable.

Here is a little demo image showing instancing, DOF and Arealights in action. The arealight shader is a custom one written by myself. The other objects just have default “matte” shaders applied.
The floor got a paintedplastic shader with Blenders UV test grid applied(Note: you don’t have to save generated images to use them within renderman. they are saved and converted to Rendermans native mipmapped file format by default).

a small video tutorial with explainations will hopefully follow next week. Also showing the rendering and sending all your custom passes (displays) to the blender compositor.

I wasn’t lazy the last weeks as I worked on a pretty big project (probably the most important one). It’s a Blender 2.5 to Renderman integration I’ve been developing since a few months back. It is still in very early stage but i think you can already do some nice things with it.

By now it is able to do the following things:

-export Blenders Camera data to RIB

-export Blenders Lamps to RIB (including Point, Spot and Directional Lamps)

-export poly meshs and subdivs

-automatically create shadow map passes for Spots and Directionals (Point is on its way I’m still struggling a bit with envmap creation i think they are just rotated wrong)

-create custom passes

-create materials for custom passes

-choose which objects/lights are to be exported in which pass

-choose your own light shaders

-create your own options/attributes depending on the ones supported by your renderman compliant renderer and save them in a preset

-create your own list of hiders and corresponding options and save them in a preset

-chose renderengine, shader compiler, shader info tool executables and save them in a preset

-automatic detection of display drivers by choosing a display drivers folder and save that in a preset

-automatic detection of available shaders by choosing directories for the shaders (also saved in presets)

-automatic detection of shader parameters

-automatic detection of AOVs available for assigned shaders (create custom passes(diffuse, spec, etc))

-write shaders in the blender text editor and compile them from  there

-add as many displays to each pass as you want

thats all for now i guess. if ive forgotten something, you’ll notice it either by yourself or by watching the video tutorial i will upload in a few days

hope its already useful for some of you

critics and comments are welcome

edit: updated the script with an initial attempt at material preview. still not working as expected with a strange bug crashing the whole material properties UI. still have to figure out whats causing this, whether its a bug in my script or in blender.

also did some tweakings on the preset saving the displaydriver extension and on the UI.

btw: if youre on windows, the displaydriver extension is probably wrong for you. “.so” is the standard linux extension for libraries. on windows it’s “.dll”. will fix that that the script checks the OS and finds out the extension on its own. but for now remember that!

blender to renderman