Blender 2.5 RenderMan Exporters

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While “RenderMan” could refer to many things, it  is also a standard protocol for rendering in many renderers, for instance, 3Delight, Air, Aqsis, Pixie, PRMan and many others not listed here. Currently there seem to be at least 3 parties working on their own 3 versions of Blender 2.5 to RenderMan connectors.

As abhishek wrote us:

It looks like Blender+Renderman is getting some attention. Right now there 2 (maybe 3) scripts are being written for blender 2.5x. Now that i have dug up some teaser screenshot, I decided to submit the news.

Eric Back (whiterabbit) who already has a working script for 2.49 series is working on 2.5 plugin. It looks like he was quietly working up on it and now has posted some screenshots. here it is, the teasers..

On the other hand frigge (nick name in blenderartist) is developing another script which seems to progressing pretty well too.

Here is an even more comprehensive news..

Hurray for the developers, i am very happy that Eric has not given up on the project and deserves a lot more attention.

Another person heard to be working on one is Matt Ebb. According to his blog post, he’s working on his own version focusing only for his own use and will release the code very soon. He said he’s concentrating on 3Delight as he’s going to use that in his upcoming project. (If you are interested by his decision you can find more informations on this on his blog replies.) Nathan Vegdahl (Cessen) seems to be joining his prior effort with Matt.

I was wondering if all these projects were competing with each others, I asked frigge (Sascha Fricke) by a chance in the IRC and he didn’t see this as  competitions as all of the exporters seems to have different approaches and reasons.

At the moment it seems to me that Eric Back (WHiTeRaBBiT)’s version is the most complete one, isn’t? Any reader has experience on this and want to share, like what’s the best part of each project and tasks that suit them best? And how will these outburst of RenderMan exporters affect the future of render API or even the internal renderer?

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    • http://www.martinlindelof.com Martin Lindelöf

      I am just stoked about all these render engines, that used to have very weird way of material settings (with no or little visual feedback) then export, launch renderer. load scene. etc

      now are becoming more adapted to the internal blender workflow. In the end I think the Blender Renderer will gain from this. If it can take a more externalized approach to the suite itself and adapt to the competitors way.

    • DanielWray

      I’ve only experience with WhiteRabbits 2.49b script, but from what I’ve seen it looks to be the most feature rich, not to say that the other’s are bad in anyway, by the sounds of it, it seems that each developer is targeting a different audience and of course, each category of user(s) will need a slightly different way of working I.e. more on flexibility, or ease of us etcetera.

      Anyway, I think all three efforts are excellent and can only lead to good things. Having the exporters will allow artists to really take the power of REYES and hopefully produce some stunning results.

    • kijja

      Wish Blender good luck in all decision situation.

    • http://www.mookie3d.weebly.com mookie

      Good exports for renderman can bring a lot of proffesional 3d graphics to Blender. Many commercial 3d softwares do not have anything like this! I hope the scripts will be available soon!

    • godzilla

      mmmhh… so,

      - brecht is leaving blender development (and he’s the only one who knows internal renderer)
      - core developers like nathan and matt are putting effort in exporters like those….

      Am I the only one who suspects to know what this means??
      I won’t be surprised to see the official end of blender internal development….

      What do you think?

    • http://sites.google.com/site/funlw65 funlw65

      Personally, I think that having a connection with RenderMan you assured your place in animation movies industry. So, is a must (don’t forget that Ton presented Sintel movie in a trip over the sea and got some advices…). I don’t think blender internal render engine will have an end. Anyway, I think yafaray needs entire attention from developers part.

    • kijja

      IMO : This is Next Fighter for Mango Project!!!

      http://www.luma-pictures.com

      I like their City of Ember project.

      hahaha.. my first 2 post in one news head line.

    • Matt Heimlich

      I hope to see more RenderMan features added to Blender Internal in the future, or to see a script that can do a decent job of grabbing the info it needs from Blender settings and export to a Renderman renderer.

    • LoafMag

      Yes WhiteRabbit’s one is probably the most comprehensive, he has tons of renderman knowledge and has learned from past mistakes with Mosaic for the 2.4 series (and that too, was a huge project).
      Hss approach will resemble more of those in-house pipelines at various CG studios, and can be customized to suitable from both TD’s and artists alike.

      He seems to keep a low profile until he has more to show off I think. But it will be absolutely amazing, no doubt about that.

    • Erwin Coumans

      Yet another approach would be to read all the data directly from a .blend file and convert it to renderman. The open source C/C++ blend parser extracts all data from .blend files, old versions and new such as 2.5

      You can see this in action in gamekit, http://gamekit.googlecode.com, for Windows, Linux, Mac and iPhone.

    • http://chamananimation.com Titus

      I’ve some experience coding a renderman exporter for LightWave. While any script is welcome I’m very skeptic about the utility of an intrepreted script, I prefer this being doing at a C/C++ level for reliable and faster exports. RenderMan excels when you need to render million of polygons or particles over a renderfarm, with complex scenes. The idea behind renderman is to optimize heavily your scene, so we need an exporter that makes this task as friendly as possible, or at least doable (RIBBoxes, Level od Detail, RiReadArchive, etc. and not just direct exporting of objects).

      Supporting different renderman renderers is also a nightmare, because they have different features and are changing constantly, breaking your code. I hope they concentrate in the best renderers like PRman and 3Delight, only then go for the rest, just my two cents.

    • flagus

      Hello to all. Its been sometime now that I’ve been using Blender, I mostly do architectural modeling. I mostly use Yafaray for my photo realistic renders. I know that I’m not speaking on the topic of this thread but you guys seem to know quite a bit about rendering.

      Recently I’ve saw a lot of beautiful renders made with the internal renderer. Using either 2.49 or 2.5. Does anyone have any link or advice on how to properly use the internal renderer to get such good results. Yafaray is great and give me really great results but takes too much time to render.

      There’s also 2 questions that I would like to ask. We’ve all seen the great images made for Sintel and from what I’ve read its was made with the internal renderer. My question is, first, was those renders really made with the internal renderer? Secondly, if yes anyone know where could find a tutorial on how the Sintel’s artist achieved it.

      I’ve read that the new renderer was not in the last release, but it would really be great to know how the guys did it.

      It would be great if someone could answer those little questions, as most of the time its just like: “Wow… you do not know this!! Go to hell with your stupid questions…those are basic thing that everyone should know fool.”

      Thanks for reading and happy blendering :).