Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks 2002

Welcome to the Fourth Annual Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks!

What's on this page?

Materials from the 4rth installment of Stupid RenderMan/RAT Tricks. 
Speakers:
Ian Stephenson  Compressing RIB files
Eric Leven      AOVs
Christophe Hery Shadow Buffers
Wayne Wooten    Profiling Shaders

Compressing RIB Files

Ian Stephenson presented a way of saving disk space for a sequence by compressing the RIB and tracking the differences between each frame.

He has a web page with more information, including a 1 page pdf file.

Rendering Lights Separately and Simultaneously

Eric Leven presented (actually Doug Epps did the presenting) the use of Arbritary Output Variables to create an image for each light simultaneously so these images can be composited at will for the final balance.

Here are his powerpoint slides. Also, Eric provided a tar file which contains example shaders and RIB that can be rendered.

Shadow Buffers

Christophe Hery talked about Shadow Buffers and their uses for depth cueing, bounding box detection, quick & dirty raytacing and finally showed how to implement sub-surface scattering. (Much thanks to Andrea Maiolo for the brain-storming sessions. -- Christophe)

Here are his powerpoint slides.

Profiling Shaders

Wayne Wooten presented Shader Profiling. This technique allows one to see relatively how long each micropoloygon takes to render in a given image. In fact PRMan 11 has these feature built in.

Here are his powerpoint slides.

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

The RMR is Copyright © 1995-2005 Tal L. Lancaster all rights reserved

Last modified: Wed Aug 14 21:01:19 PDT 2002