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3Delight/Blender Exporter

32

You can now render with 3Delight straight from Blender with Matt Ebb's new addon.

Matt writes:

An external render engine exporter for Blender 2.5

This addon allows rendering blender scenes in 3Delight, a renderman compliant renderer. Most (but not all) of the code is generalised and should be compatible with any renderer that accepts RIB, however for convenience, it’s designed for use with 3Delight.

It’s not intended to be an extremely flexible and customisable pipeline, rather it’s meant to be a bit more straightforward and less complicated for individual artists or small teams to do practical work with.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

32 Comments

  1. given the fact that Blender's missing a really advanced internal renderer ,I salute this attempt...Bravo Matt and thank you!...

  2. Jame

    CPU limitation yes - but the render quality you can get uhm beats BI for ages.

    plus not everybody has a render farm or some like me also like to continue work
    while rendering.

    so it seems to be a good deal

  3. Ahhh! I am so eager to test this out, keep having path errors. Running Win7 64 bit, 2.56.1 r34694M.

    Keep getting cannot open shader. Been trying to set the paths manually, no luck so far.

  4. Hi guys, I'm investigating a fix for some of the trouble people have been having.

    It turns out in recent versions, 3Delight doesn't install a global environment variable pointing to its location on disk (at least here on mac osx, probably similar for other oses).

    In short, this means that running blender from the terminal (as I have been) will work, but running it from an icon won't have the correct environment variables. I'm trying to come up with a work around now.

    thanks,

    Matt

  5. Andreas Galster on

    I just wish 3Delight wouldn't be so confusing. Aqsis seems to be much more easier. When you install 3Delight all you get is a shell and then you're supposed to know what to type in the shell. D'oh not very user friendly :/.

  6. I get the "shader plastic/pintlight not found in path" issues aswell, even if i run it from terminal (on Windows XP) and setting the paths manually doesn't help.

    Can't wait for a fix to try this out! Looks very promising.

  7. I was really looking forward to trying out a new render and after reading about your plugin, thought i would give it a go!.

    Downloaded 3Delight then your plugin and placed it into the add-on's folder!.
    However, when i went into blenders add-on's to tick the box to be able to use with blender, i found nothing in the list for 3Delight?.

    It's something i would really love to try though as it seems as if it can give some fantastic results!.

    If anyone maybe could help me figure where i must be going wrong, i would be most greatful!.

    Many thanks!,
    Wayne

    P.s, running on win32 bit!.

  8. wayne, it's not you, it's the exporter. Funnily enough after only ever being able to test it on my system, it doesn't work quite the same on other peoples' systems ;)

    I'm working on it, hopefully will be able to fix it soon - I'll mention it on my site when it's done.

    cheers

  9. Thought i was doing something wrong for a moment!.

    As i say, did download 3delight which for some reason also seems kind different to render engine's as when i downloaded it, it seems to have two options when i look for it in my start menu!.

    Look forward to being able to use it as it seems very interesting!.

    Many thanks
    Wayne!.

  10. I can get 3delight to render on my Ubuntu system by opening a terminal, changing to the 3delight directory, and typing "source .3delight_bash". Then I am able to start Blender (2.56-34678-64 bit) from that same terminal. With the plugin installed to scripts/addons, I then activate it in user preferences.

    So far I can just render a very simple scene, but the results are not as expected. Also, when I attempt to use the old Mosaic test scenes (but not the old Mosaic plugin, of course), I don't get anything like what I could with Blender 2.49/Mosaic/Aqsis. Granted, I haven't looked very deeply into the new settings as of yet.

    Your efforts are much appreciated Matt. I will see what I can do with it when I have a chance. As things are I'm just learning Renderman myself.

  11. Hello
    Thanks for Great Work Matt.
    Btw
    I have a question to DaveLeitz. How you install 3delight in linux 64bit ? Could You make a simple tut ? Your directory tree, bash command etc.
    Greetings

  12. @ lolko7,

    Well, I haven't really installed it in the general sense of the word. I just downloaded the file from 3delight and extracted it to my home folder. In my case: "/home/david/3delight-9.0.83". Inside the extracted directory is another directory, "Linux-x86_64", and two files, ".3delight_bash" and ".3delight_csh".

    The file .3delight_bash is used to add the necessary commands to you terminal window when you type in the command: "source .3delight_bash". You can run 3delight from the command line and directly render RIB files that way. However, when you close that terminal window, Bash will forget those commands. One way around that is to add a file, ".bash_aliases" to you home directory with this content: "source /home/david/3delight-9.0.83/.3delight_bash". That way, whenever you log in, those commands will be available from the command line any time you open a terminal.

    So, with the plugin installed to your scripts/addons directory, you should be able to activate 3delight in your user preferences and select it at the top of your Blender window. The only thing is, you must start Blender from the Bash terminal any time you want to use 3delight.

    So, step by step:
    1 Download the file from 3delight.
    2 In your Downloads folder right click and select "Extract Here" (if you use Gnome/Nautilus).
    3 Drag the extracted folder from your Downloads directory to your home folder.
    4 Open your favorite text editor.
    5 Type the following: "source /home/[your name]/3delight-9.0.83/.3delight_bash"
    6 Save the file as ".bash_aliases" in your home folder. (Don't forget to log out and log back in.)
    7 I'll assume you've already got the plugin from Matt installed. ;)
    8 Open a terminal and change to your Blender 2.56 directory: "cd ~/Blender" (whatever you call it, I put the revision number to keep track of which version I have installed from Graphicall. I use gdawg's version for Ubuntu 10.10)
    9 Type "./blender"
    10 Open the test file (primitives_test.blend) from Matt and render it. You shouldn't have to change any settings at all to see results. It will be obvious that the render isn't from the Blender internal renderer since it will scan across the image editor window from top to bottom instead of center to out.

  13. I try 0.5.1 in winXP 32bit, blender 2.5 from graphicall.
    It's work and I can first render scene in Renderman family!!
    I now like Renderman.The Exporter Very Beta but I Wait for V 1.0.
    Really Useful for me.
    by the way
    blender render API and blender add on>> ROCK!!!
    Cheer..

  14. Hi Matt!
    I did a couple of tests, everything works fine, your overview on vimeo is very educational.
    Is it possible to make an advanced tutorial for blender users? Especially how to setup AO, GI, shaders with textures in a different situations, for example for interior and studio setup, maybe outdoor.
    Best regards,
    Russian Community!

  15. Dear kijja
    Could you give us dummies a more detailed step by step tutorial on getting it to work in Blender 2.56a Beta? I copied the render_3delight folder into the addons folder of the Blender 2.56a beta installation.
    But it does not show up under the addons in the User Preferences window.
    Could you help?
    car313

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