Thanks :)

Due to some oversight I forgot to add sources to some very important
packages…

Changes :

Code:Blocks added to replace Dev C++
GIMP source added
Python source added
CGKit 2.0 source added
Blend files removed (plan to add it next update with BRAT stable
models, some required too much initial setup and didn't render right)

Hosting update

For now consider the free host ISO OBSOLETE!!!

Here is a torrent file for the latest ISO, again sorry guys this was
just a simple oversight and will not happen again.

http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=25513b40acb12cb6b5116ab7d7d6a8a4be60abb6&f=Blender%20to%20Renderman%20Artist%20Tools%200.5%20RC2.torrent

Replace Dev with CodeBlocks (win/linux).

Hasn't a graphics production based distro already been done?

In the meantime this ISO will have to do and honestly I will keep em coming since not everyone uses Linux ;).

I am building a Linux machine, where I am computer parts are expensive and hard to come by so this is taking a while, but hopefully when that is done perharps I will have a better experience with a Blender to Renderman pipeline. In the meantime I will try out Pixie and see how that goes with MOSAIC and hopefully I will be able to compile my own shaders and create fragments to use them :-)

I have read through the some renderman tutorials and course notes from siggraph and I have an engineering background and also coded in c, matlab and python so the maths behind creating shaders or reading shader code has not been a problem I just need to get my hands dirty and move from theory to practical work.

About making a knoppix LiveCD, taking in account that the iso is 607 MB even without operating system… it'll be difficult to acomodate all this stuff in a single CD.

May be a bootable DVD could work instead….

A big THANK YOU for all the work dedicated to make this recopilation possible.

YES please someone make a knopix bootable blender CD with all the render farm software on it (preferably farmerjoe) or teach me how ill make it :D

That would be extremely usefull here, overnight I could just boot up all 90 comps in the lab and get them cranking

PrMan (commercial)
3Delight (commercial)
Air (commercial)
Aqsis (OS)
Pixie (OS)

All of the renderers are fully compliant to the RiSpec and many of its more modern extensions. This means they all support procedural surfaces with mircopoly displacements, real DOF, real motion blur, arbitrary output data (such as baking normals and anything you can handle in a shader), surface/displacement/volume/image shading, fully featured and complex shading language (RSL), complex management of scene data through RIB (really important for moving data through a render farm or editing scenes outside of the modeling environment) and the passing of data from RIB to RSL (which means passing attributes from a mesh to a shader or data from surface shader to light shader ect). One of the interesting things about RenderMan is you can hang out in any number of renderer forums or graphic sites and pick up information that will work with your own modeler or renderer, also once in RIB format the project is far more portable then a modeling format.

As far as techniques I'm integrating several standard techniques into MOSAIC with vary levels of compatibility:

Raster based techniques which are still used by some large studios such as ILM, these are very fast, guaranteed compatible and look as good as raytracing when done properly (however more picky about scene setup). These techniques will work with all 5 renderers except where noted:
- Shadow maps for distant, spot and cube mapped point lights
- Faked soft shadows using shadow maps (not just blurred maps)
- Occlusion using shadow depth maps (only supported by Air and Aqsis)
- Environment mapped reflection and refraction using fresnel
- Blocking of self reflectance in environment map using occlusion data (makes env maps look more natural)
- The bending or surface normals based on surface position into env map lookup (great for env cube maps on flat surfaces)
- Faked SSS using shadow maps (modified technique used in Finding Nemo to work like Blender's SSS)
- Faked global illumination using blurred environment maps
- Raymarching of volumes such as atmospheres or interior volumes using shadow maps (much faster then raytracing)
All of the above techniques are automatically used and are controlled with the same controls in Blender you usually control raytracing with (since they are very similar).

Raytracing techniques are available in PrMan, 3Delight, Air and Pixie (Aqsis is a pure REYES renderer and does not currently support raytracing). These techniques are much slower but are very close to what Blender produces:
- Soft raytraced shadows
- True area lights (not supported by Pixie although could be faked using gather() in SL)
- True SSS using shadeops that come with each package (not supported by Pixie)
- Raytraced reflection and refraction
- Raytraced occlusion
- Single bounce indirect diffusion GI using a trick with gather() (I don't plan on adding this to MOSAIC)
- Raytracing through volumes (very slow compared to shadow maps)

Irradiance caching and photon mapping techniques are available in PrMan, 3Delight, Air and Pixie. These techniques vary slightly for each renderer but I plan on getting photon caustics working at the very least:
- Baking irradiance data to cache for smooth occlusion
- Combining irradiance cache with photon data to produce GI
- Casting photons for caustics
These techniques basically just cache and smooth course data to produce smooth and fast results for caustics, occlusion and indirect diffusion and are therefore much fast then raytracing.

Point clouds and brickmaps are supported by PrMan, 3Delight, Air (not sure to what extent yet) and Pixie. These are essentially 3D environment maps (instead of storing the data in a cube map it is stored in a 3D map representing the geometries surface). The advantage to this is you get all the capabilities of raytracing but the control and approximation of environment maps. Any data can be baked into them but I'm focused on using them for occlusion and indirect diffusion. Point clouds are probably not as fast as env maps but considerably faster then raytracing especially when dealing with heavily displaced surfaces ;-)

The bottom line is because of the flexibility of RenderMan all renderers can fake most modern techniques with plain old shadow and env maps (something I intend to prove here soon). However for more modern techniques it'll have to be Pixie for OSRenderMan. Now the biggest problem between OS and commercial is generally stability and speed, Pixie is nearly as fast as the commercial renderers in most cases but can be very unstable at times. Aqsis is slower (although their working on that) but generally more stable and has more features from the RiSpec. Personally I get frustrated with both OSRenderMan renderers when doing a lot of test rendering in 3Delight and Air as they are so much more stable, but if nobody finds and reports bugs in Aqsis and Pixie they wont get any better! As for the commercial renderers 3Delight is hands down the best but is has a slower raytracer then Air, however Air uses a lot of non compliant features (on purpose).