RenderMania - Links

Tutorial Links

The RenderMan Repository (Siggraph notes in pdf format) The place to pick up shaders - good links section and Siggraph Course notes. Maintained by Tal Lancaster.

Katsu's shaders If you need any persuading about the power of shaders look no further!

Steve May's Rman notes Great for beginners - although you may want the RenderMan Companion handy. Although you can link to rmannotes.sl I would recommend using the patterns.h header that comes with BMRT 2.5 as these are more up to date.

Jonathan Merrit's Raytracing Tutorial Gives information on doing the infamous glass sphere on checkerboard image :o) Takes advantage of BMRT's raytracing features.

BMRT Skysphere rendering Get shadows looking like realistic daylight

Justin Cobb's Multipass shadows Based on Jeremy Birn's Digital Lighting and Rendering book. Get the shader used in this here

Savanah College RenderMan course Had some really good displacement and surface tutorials - being updated with the new term (I will ask about mirroring the old pages if they don't return as they very useful)

Short tutorial on rendering caustics using RenderMan and Houdini.

Nicholas Yue's tutorial on creating an ocean scene with RenderMan and Houdini

Nicolas Aithadi's tutorial on using RIBBOX's with MTOR - useful if you are running Maya.

Subscribe to the BMRT egroup - useful email discussion list. I recommend joining.

Toon Shading by David MacDonald - several techniques described. Also look at Ivan De Wolf's toon shaders.

The Affine Toolkit by Thomas E. Burge has some useful information for advanced shader writers such as several Example Light shaders and a Menger Sponge example of a procedural DSO primitive. As well as several helper libraries if you are writing in C. A rich resource, but only if you really know what you're doing - you have been warned :o)

Paul Bourke's Personal pages cover many different aspects of 3D on one site. If you're feeling ambitious/inspired you can also hire out the Swinburne Supercomputer for suprisingly reasonable rates - especially given that you'll have BMRT running at 60Ghz! prices in Australian Dollars

Wooksang Chang's Computer Graphics Contains several shaders and images.

Jeremy S. De Bonet's shaders contains source code for a spiders web, chain link fence, and newspaper shader - all procedurally generated.

Daylon Graphics - the people who make the heightfield modeller Leveller have a few basic shaders that change based on the ground surface.

Colin Chung has some very nice experiments with HDRI imaging and radiosity in his gallery section - mostly rendered with Lightwave but he also experiments with BMRT. Especially impressive are his female head models.

Etienne Blythe's Nearworlds. Not strictly RenderMan, but has some nice Terragen renderings and information on using Cinema 4D. Plus the layout changes all the time ;o)

Pixar's RenderMan Specification - essential reading - links to the updated 2000 3.2 spec and the 3.1 spec (useful as it is in HTML as well as PostScript). Pixar's application notes and Shading Language Extensions can also be found here - quite a lot of these are supported by BMRT although I know for certain textureinfo() and message passing from displacement shaders isn't available. Message passing can also only pass one constant value (cannot vary with P).

Renderers

BMRT The classic free for non-commercial use raytracer.

BMRT links page The ultimate RenderMan links page - updated regularly

Render Dot C is a scanline implementation renderer written by Rick Lamont - also available is Maitai - for integration with Maya as an alternative to MTOR.

Rick also maintains a link of every RenderMan renderer there has been!

Aqsis a Reyes Renderer for windows - now in it's second release.

Air is a Windows based renderer with a lot of potential as it is very fast. Also includes a GUI to make life easier. Air is now out of beta testing and is available commercially. Previously a DOS program known as Siren

3Delight A very nice Reyes renderer with good driver documentation. Some people have had problems getting it working properly though

Ian Stevenson has several RenderMan tools including his renderer Angel - he works at Bournemouth University - home to the National Centre for Computer Animation. SLander comes with SlcEditor as well.

Non-RenderMan Complient Renderers

Desktop Radiance is the Windows port of the unix software Radiance. Written by Greg Lawson this offers very good global illumination tools - especially useful for architectural visualisation. Designed to be used with AutoCAD but you can use Conrad (or free Conrad Lite) or DXF2RAD to covert from 3ds or Dxf formats respectively.

MegaPOV by Nathan Kopp offers several advantages over the standard POVray - my favourite feature is it's photon mapping ability to give realistic specular caustics. Moray is a good low cost POVray modeller. Easier to use than RenderMan renderers, but lacks the power of Shading Language.

Lightflow is a very realistic global illumination renderer by Jacopo Pantaleoni. There is also a very good material editor called MATspider and the Metasequoia modelling program can be used together with Metalight or by using 3Dwin. You can also use AseToLf to covert from 3D Studio Max ASE (ASCII Scene Export) format to a format Lightflow understands using the Python module.

Modelling Software (below Ł3000)

3D Studio Max One of the most popular modelling packages now supports RenderMan thanks to Animal Logic's MaxMan This plugin is free for BMRT only and has great support from the MaxMan mailing list. I can recommend it highly.

Rhino 3D has supported BMRT from version 1.1 - includes a seperate download of BMRT with an installer. Easy to use but only really adds shader support. There are several free plugins such as RhinoMan (shareware) - useful if using Rhino.

Texturing Programs (Professional)

Pixar's Slim which comes as part of RenderMan Artists Tools is a fully featured GUI based shader writer - and it should be good for the price! Together with MTOR (Maya To RenderMan) these provide seamless support for Alias Wavefront's Maya.

Arete Digital Nature Tools Used on films such as Titanic and The Truman Show. Very Realistic Water and Fire plugins for several major modelling programs.

ShadeTree from Cinema Graphics provides a shader writing tool similar to Slim, but it is quite expensive. Comes with some examples.

DarkTree produced by Darkling Simulations, provides several high quality procedural textures for 3D Studio Max and Lightwave 3D. I think there are plans to incorporate some of these into MaxMan soon.

Modelling Software (free)

Blender is a free modelling and animation package from Not a Number. version 2.0 - Gameblender is really designed for games - most animation people seem to recommend 1.8. The interface is also appalling, but the features are powerful. Runs on windows and linux. You will also need the RIB python export script (pretty limited right now)

HamaPatch Based on sPatch I've heard good things about this modeller - can render to BMRT and Lightflow. There is an English instructions here and a Hamapatch FAQ in English here.

K-3DAn Interesting Windows/Linux modeller/animator - uses XML for it's shading language

The Mops Designed for use with NURBs only - integrates well, but limited in use. Runs under Tcl/Tk on Linux

Geometique is a nice Subdivision surface modeller that can output RIB as a subdivision mesh. Works well with Aqsis and should work well with BMRT 2.6.

AC3D Runs on multiplatforms and exports RIB - can only model with polygons though.

Moonlight Atelier is a free modeller based on Softimage for Linux. Unfortunately development has stopped at the official moonlight3d.org site, but this site is a fan site with a lot of good information. Exports RIB. There is also a mirror for moonlight Atelier here from this site.

Free Dimensions 0.5.4 is a free modeller that works with BMRT. There is also a shader tester and various Java3D work.

Retile Labour Project This looks good - a particle system for RenderMan under Linux - can't wait to get this working when I have the time.

Dmesh is a tool bein developed to model organic models through displacement mapping. Several body parts available for your own manipulation. Outputs RIB.

Photomodeler This freeware version allows you to use photogrammetry from several photographs to build up a 3-dimensional model. Quite good for what it is.

Terragen For when you need a landscape quickly, this software is just the job. Very good atmospherics model.

Pixels 3D (though not free) and 3D Joy (based on Vidi Presenter) are modellers for Macintosh that can export RIB. Unfortunately Pixar has stopped producing Mac RenderMan - you may be able to get it second hand, but it is very out of date. 3D Joy can interface with BMRT, but this needs a connection to a seperate machine that can run BMRT (there are no plans to port to Mac).

If you like to dive into the code there are several alternatives to Notepad. NotePad+, TextPad and UltraEdit (has RIB and SL syntax highlighting) all come recommended.

Essential Software

SlcEditor is an essential Shader value tweaker and Shader writing environment. This is based on TKmatman which SlcEditor on for Linux and Windows which also comes highly recommended.

3Dwin Really good free model conversion program which exports RIB (even handles textures in registered version) - remember to tick the normalise options or else it will come out very dark though.

Moe's Drivers provide extra functionality by giving better framebuffer and BMP format output. This link points to the mirrored download from this site. Originally posted on the BMRT egroup files section (subscription required).

Project BORG Is a free network rendering tool that runs on Java. Works, but can run slowly - only of benefit with a decent renderfarm.

Kendra a 3D paint utility for RIB from Ian Stevenson - a very neat little program (requires a steady hand :o)

UV mapper lets you line up UV textures properly. Uses Alias Wavefront object files but can easily be converted.

Font 3D Allows you to add 3D text to images. Command line utility.

X frog Is a tree and plant modeller that outputs RIB, but is a little expensive. Plant Studio Allows you to create plants as well and only costs about $20, but you will have to convert from DXF format.

3D Miracle (shareware) - create "magic eye" sterogram images and animations

A small utility to make anaglyph (red and blue) images from two BMP files. Command line utility. You can get free glasses from Stereoscopy.com. You can get another Stereomaker program here.

Sean O'Malley's HDR2TIFF program can convert hdr format images into floating point Tiff images that can be used in BMRT. Useful for general high dynamic range work by providing more than the standard 256 levels. For more about High Dynamic Range imaging have a look at Paul Debevec's work. Sean also has several other very useful programs.

Video

Ejjit's Guide to film making Really good site on creating movies and cheap FX. Mainly deals with film rather than digital.

Rastrak Award winning, but not easy to use, Linux compositing software from Hammer Head studios - they did the Wolverine Claw effect in X-Men

Apple's QuickTime Brings many codecs together under one player. It is worth paying $30 for the professional version as this unlocks the encoding options.

DivX Codec Based on Microsoft MPEG 4 technology this allows brilliant compression at just below MPEG 2 (DVD) quality. A brilliant short that you need DivX for several of the following animations

405 the Movie Amazing compositing - download the movie first and try and guess how much is CG (no points for the plane :o) - then read the making of - you'll be surprised...

The Killer Bean this movie took 3 years to make and it shows - this is some of the best character animation I've seen

Full Tilt Was the opening animation to SIGGRAPH 2000 - download the large version and spot how many famous CG characters you can see at the end (most courtesy of Pixar).

VFX Pro is THE online website for effects news, jobs and techniques

Aint It Cool News is th site where you hear about movie news first - one of the first and respected in the movies business now.

Illusion Nice particle Effects package.

Morpher is a nice cheap morphing program. Has it's limitations, but you can't go wrong for $20!

The Test Card Website - exactly what it says :o)

Inspiration

The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository Pick up a Cyberware scanned version of the Stanford bunny! From geommetry work by Greg Turk.

Paul Debeverac Has a lot of information - mainly related to image based rendering and HDRI images.

Jean Yves Bouguet Desktop Geometry capture. This site gives information on cheaply capturing geometry of small objects by using close range photogrammetry.

Matt Pharr Has a free skin illumination shader for download. Combined with an image overlay it can look quite impressive - also several possiblities for adding procedural patterning to this shader. The Siggraph 2000 Course notes also cover realistic skin rendering.

Ken Musgrave has some great procedural textures - espcially terrain, clouds and water effects. This site accompanies his section of Texturing and Modelling - a procedural approach. His current latest project is building a virtual universe as head of Fractal World's

Ken Perlin's homepage - if you haven't heard of Perlin noise where have you been?!?

Henrik Wann Jensen's Homepage This is the guy who invented the concept of photon mapping to give accurate caustics. Has some nice animations done with his Dali renderer.

Hugo Elias' site Several well written articles with Pseudo code to accompany them. The models section is probably the area you want to see first. Thisis also available for download for offline viewing.

Nick Foster's page has a lot of cool information on rendering fluid dynamics in liquids and gases.

Visual Simulation Publications Several research topics covering natural phenomena such as daylight and night time rendering and physically accurate water rendering.

Chris Colefax's include files are designed for POVray, but look quite impressive and could give you a few ideas for RenderMan shaders/procedural models.

Charles Poynton's Colour and Gamma FAQ's basically everything you ever wanted to know about colour and gamma - easy to read too.

Green Flashes Everything about the atmospheric phenomenon called a "Green Flash" including some computer generated simulations.

Kite Photography Lots of information on cheap aerial photography techniques - just watch out for local flying restrictions!

The Penultimate Pinhole page contains everything you'd want to know about pinhole photography

Holographic Raytracing It can be done...

Mercury Project Gives information on how the Earth really looks from space and factors influencing it.

NASA Space Site Has tonnes of information on every planet in our solar system - including maps that can be used as lattitude-longitude texture maps

The Widescreen Centre has lots of obscure camera equipment to buy or rent - specialising in 3D and panoramic photography

The Blueprint collection This guy collects blueprints - several examples (cars) on his website - may be useful as reference for building models

Thomas Suurland Also has a large collection of blueprints including cars , aircraft and military vehicles, as well as some really nice renderings.

John Beale's webpage Contains some nice fractal landscape generation programs.

The story behind the Utah teapot - aka why the 3D world is obsessed with the things!

Information about The Cornell Box - the standard radiosity test subject.

General 3D Tutorials

Flay.com Mainly Lightwave news but covers 3D news and new animations too also has good links and articles.

Newtekniques Tutorials written specifically for Lightwave 3D but can be easily adapted to RenderMan. Provides some inspiration - particularly for explosions.

3Dcafe along with Avalon is the best resource for free 3D models on the internet. 3D Mania also has several models and textures to download freely. Use 3Dwin to convert to RIB.

3Dluvr.com has 3D competitions and tutorials - especially good for 3D Studio Max.

Renderosity.com is a neat site with lots of information for digital artists. Looks particularly aimed at digital character creation.

Gilles Tran Weird, but still pretty cool images from Gilles Tran. Includes several "Making Of" tutorials for several winning images from the Internet Ray Tracing Competition. Mainly deals with POVray but most of this information can be adapted.

POVray links If you're still not satisfied you're bound to find the thing you need here. Maintained by Ken Tyler