Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks 2001

Welcome to the Third Annual Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks!

What's on this page?

Introduction
Constant Tiled Textures
Deep Shadows
Local bounce lighting
RenderMan EZ-Bake Oven
Alfred on Large Renderfarms

Mach has been the first one to submit materials to the RMR. I will add more materials as the presenters sent them to me.

Oct 12, 2001 --It seems that some people have had trouble reading the PowerPoint slides via StarOfice. So I have uploaded a gzip'd StarOffice version of them:

ConstantTiles.ssd.gz
DeepShadows.ssd.gz

July 31, 2002 -- Dan Goldman has HTML version of his presentation on his web site. I added a link to it in his section.

Constant Tiled Textures

Mach Tony Kobayashi of Square USA presented a method of tiling on a scaling surface.

Here are his PowerPoint slides: ConstantTiles.ppt (Remember Unix users you can use StarOffice to read these)

MTK_tile.sl is Mach's example shader. NOTE: That his is just an example shader and one would want to do some optimizations for a "real" one.

Deep Shadows

Mach Tony Kobayashi of Square USA presented how he implemented "Deep Shadows".

Here are his PowerPoint slides: DeepShadows.ppt. (Remember Unix users you can use StarOffice to read these)

Local Bounce Lighting in Surface Shaders

Christophe Hery, of ILM, presented a technique for faking self re-emission of light on a surface, useful for filling in "local" shadowed areas.

Here are Christophe's PowerPoint slides: local.bounce.ppt.

The RenderMan EZ-Bake Oven

Jonathan Litt and Dan Goldman, of ILM, showed a technique for "shader baking" - caching the output of shaders into a texture map. Great for computationally expensive or hard to alias shaders.

This technique basically uses Pref to shade from the original 3d model onto a flat plan to capture the lighting to make into texture maps.

HTML version of their presentation. (There are also little animations on some of these pages)

Using Alfred Effectively on Large Renderfarms

Wayne Wooten, of Pixar, presented tips and tricks for using Alfred on very large renderfarm installations.

At the end he showed a really cool 3D gui for visualizing the traffic on Pixar's renderfarm!

Any comments or suggestions? Send them to: tal AT renderman DOT org

Last modified: Wed Jul 31 22:44:11 PDT 2002