Details..Details

In this section -- shaders, RIBS, texture-maps, C source, and utilities. Various items of interest will be added as they become available. For now the shaders section is the most developed.

What's on this page?

RIBs, Shaders, ShowAndTell, Texture-Maps
C Binding & RIB

RIBs, Shaders, Show&Tell

RIBs -- An assortment of RIBs

Shaders -- Off to the wonderful world of shaders.

DSOs -- examples of Dynamic Shared Objects

Display Drivers -- some alternate RenderMan display drivers

ShowAndTell --

Depth Of Field
Inoise - integrated Perlin Noise
High Dynamic Range images
Houdini -- Some examples using RenderMan with Houdini
Refraction, Reflection, and Fresnel -- shader functions
Shadermaps for accelerating procedural shading
SRT -- Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks
rmBlockers -- blockers & cucaloris
UberLight -- lots of lighting controls.
misc. ShowAndTell -- pictures, animations and their code to generate them.

Texture-Maps -- TIFF images to be used in your shaders.

Inoise - Integrated Perlin Noise

At the SIGGRAPH 2001 Sketches and Applications, Ian Stephenson presented: Inoise.

This is a DSO shader op for doing Integrated Perlin Noise which should provide better anti-aliasing detail than just pure frequency clamping. Go to the Inoise link for more information, source, examples, and his PowerPoint SIGGRAPH presentation. (Linux users don't forget that you can use StarOffice to read MS Powerpoint slides.)

High Dynamic Range images

Using high dynamic range(HDR) images is a common way of trying to get global information from a set/environment (typically real world but it doesn't have to be). Sometimes this is referred to as Image Based Lighting (IBL). Paul Debevec made this technique very popular a few years ago. Now many studios, such as ILM and DD, are making use of this.

On Paul's most excellent site there are a number of example HDR images and a link to, HDR Shop, a great tool for dealing with HDR images. It also makes making use of HDR images easier with RenderMan rendering. The program only runs under Windows machines.

Simon Bunker has put together a whole bunch of links and information on HDR. So rather than duplicate efforts, check out his site rendermania. Also there you will find some of the shaders that he uses.

Speaking of shaders, there were some that Larry Gritz provided from the SIGGRAPH 2001 RenderMan Course.

Shadermaps: method for Accelerating Procedural Shading

At SIGGRAPH 2001 Thouis Jones, Ronald Perry, Michael Callahan talked about using shader maps to pre-bake the static procedural parts of objects in a scene into texture maps. Then use these maps in addition to just running the lighting part of the shaders to help speed up the rendering times. They talk about their technique and have an example shader in their Technical Report (in both PDF and Postscript).

Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks

At Long last the Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks (SRT) have a home. Although not too much to show yet.

srt1999 - the first annual SRT
2000 - the second annual SRT
srt2001 - 3rd annual SRT
srt2002 - 4rth annual SRT
srt2003 - 5th annual SRT
srt2004 - 6th annual SRT
srt2005 - 7th annual SRT
srt2006 - 8th annual SRT
srt2007 - 9th annual SRT
srt2008 -- 10th annual SRT

Example C bidings of newer prman primitives

RiCurves

C program for RIB from Application Note 19:

Curves "cubic" [4] "nonperiodic" "P" [0 0 0 -1 -.5 1 2 .5 1 1 0 -1 ] "width" [.1 .04]

#include <ri.h>

main()
{
  RtToken type = "cubic";
  RtInt ncurves = 1;
  RtInt nvertices[1] = {4};
  RtPoint P[4] = {{0, 0, 0},  {-1, -.5, 1},  {2, .5, 1},  {1, 0, -1}};
  RtToken wrap = "nonperiodic";
  RtToken width = "width";
  RtFloat nwidths[2] = {.1, .04};

RiBegin(RI_NULL);
   RiFormat (320, 160, 1);
   RiWorldBegin();
     RiDeclare ("width", "varying float");
     RiSurface("constant",RI_NULL);
     RiCurves (type, ncurves, nvertices, wrap, RI_P, (RtPointer) P,  RI_WIDTH, &nwidths, RI_NULL);
     RiWorldEnd();
   RiEnd();
}