If you are familiar with Renderman you are most probably familiar with the concept of render passes and their use. However my Blender Renderman exporter (with matt ebb’s Blender/3delight exporter and the RibMosaic project I start to feel that there is a need to give my project a name to prevent confusion). Offers a different use for render passes as a side effect: Preview passes.
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!
After some pain here is my first render with the new exporter, pretty simple (and with errors), but more complex ones comes on their way.
First Image
I’m doing the vfx of a short film, and after some research I’ve decided to use Blender, Aqsis and Pixie (Blender Internal and Yafaray looks great, but can’t be customised, and some things are simply impossible to do). I’ll let you know my advances.
Regards!!
And thanks for your work!!
Hi!!
How work the Default Names inside Rib Structure?
If I leave checked it simply uses blank “”, but if I fill it all works, but the objects exports all in the same file, rewriting it.
For Example:
ReadArchive "/home/gabriel/Documentos/Proyectos/2031/Blender/Scene/Objects/object.rib"
ReadArchive "/home/gabriel/Documentos/Proyectos/2031/Blender/Scene/Objects/object.rib"
WorldEnd
Thanks!!
:O I’ve reading the code and I think I got it, I can set variables with:
[scene], [frame], [name], [pass], [var], [driver], [dir]
And the last for now, a render a bit more complex (maintain renderman is a great button
).
Another Image
Hi!!
I can render a scene with shadows, but there is some problem with bias.
Where can I adjust this?
Thanks!!
Could Sascha Fricke find some time to tell us dummies how to get the exporter running? I downloaded a build from graphicall.org and copied the contents of blender_renderman into the scripts>addons folder of Blender 2.56. But nothing shows up under the addons under user preferences.
Nice if someone or Sascha Fricke could bother to do a small blow by blow account of how to go about getting the exporter to work in Blender 2.56.
Regards