RenderMan-related Links

These entries are in no particular order, and do not reflect any endorsement on my part except where specifically indicated.

General RenderMan Information and Documentation

• The RenderMan Interface 3.2 Specification (July 2000), available in both PDF and PostScript, is the official document on the RI standard.

• Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures by Anthony A. Apodaca and Larry Gritz (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1999, ISBN 1-55860-618-1) is the modern guide to RenderMan usage. I'm sure you'll find it completely indispensible. The link above to the MKP web site also has links to auxiliary online materials such as shader source code, errata, and user contributions.

• Read the comp.graphics.rendering.renderman FAQ (also translated into Russian).

• The RenderMan Repository, run by Tal Lancaster of Walt Disney Feature Animation (formerly of CalTech) has set up a site for dissemination of shaders, RIB files, etc. He's also got all the latest links to RenderMan-related stuff on the net.

• Texturing and Modeling: a Procedural Approach, 2nd edition by David Ebert, Ken Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steve Worley (Academic Press, 1998, ISBN 0-12-228730-4) is a great source for people who are interested in procedural texturing. Though the whole thing is applicable to any system featuring procedural texturing, a few chapters have their examples specifically in RenderMan Shading Language. The site above has FTP links to the source code.

• SIGGRAPH course notes pertaining to RenderMan available for download from the RenderMan Repository.

• The older official RenderMan Interface 3.1 Specification (1989) in HTML and PDF.

• Of course, I still heartily recommend the book The RenderMan Companion by Steve Upstill. But there's noplace to link to, since it was written way before the web existed.

• CA301 - Malcolm Kesson's course notes on RenderMan from the Savannah College of Art & Design.

RenderMan-related discussions and groups

• comp.graphics.rendering.renderman USENET group.

• eGroups BMRT discussion

• eGroups BORG discussion

• CG Surfacing Mail List - this page will let you view the archives or subscribe.

RenderMan-compliant Renderers

• Pixar's RenderMan Toolkit 3.9 (a.k.a. PhotoRealistic RenderMan, a.k.a. PRMan) is the most widely used RenderMan implementation, and in fact dominates the high-end rendering scene for feature films. PRMan has been used by many production houses, including ILM, Digital Domain, Disney, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Tippet, and others. It was used to render effects for The Abyss, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Casper, Apollo 13, Contact, Starship Troopers, Toy Story (Classic and II), A Bug's Life, Star Wars I, Dinosaur, and many many other films. It runs on SGI, Sun, DEC Alpha OSF-1, Linux/Intel, Linux/Alpha, and Windows NT/Intel, and sells for US$5000 per CPU. The Pixar web site contains extensive documentation including the RI spec, PRMan manuals, and applications notes.

• The Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT) package is close behind in second place. BMRT supports ray tracing and radiosity, area lights, full implementation of Shading Language, volume and imager shaders, displacements, and other advanced features. It also comes with a real-time RIB previewer (using OpenGL). BMRT runs on SGI, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 95/98/NT, DEC (both OSF and Alpha Linux). There are no Mac, Be, or DOS versions at this time. Despite the fact that it's free for noncommercial use and quite cheap when used commercially, it's fairly complete and has been used (to varying extents) on several productions, including A Bug's Life, Stuart Little, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Hollow Man.

• RenderDotC is a RenderMan-compliant scanline renderer available from Dot C Software. It runs under Windows, SGI, and Linux. Its authors are very knowledgable about RenderMan and it looks like a great package (though I haven't tried it myself).

• The University of Erlangen's Vision system is RenderMan-compliant. See their site for information on features and availability.

• GMAN is a "planned" GNUish, RenderMan-compliant renderer. I say "planned" because it's not much more now than some partial source code, not a working renderer.

• Advanced Rendering Technology sells RenderDrive, a hardware ray tracing engine that is RenderMan-compliant (geometry only, not SL if I understand correctly).

• AQSIS (pronounced "axis") is a new, alpha-test RenderMan-compliant renderer.

• Siren is another RenderMan-compliant renderer, written by Scott Iverson. It runs on DOS, and according to its description, implements much of the required part of the RMan 3.1 spec and several extensions, also. AIR is Siren's successor that runs under Windows.

• 3DLight is a RenderMan-compliant REYES renderer. Available for IRIX, Linux (Intel and PPC) and Windows.

Modelers, Plugins, and Conversion Tools supporting RenderMan

• solidThinking is made by GESTEL. It is a modeling system for Windows NT/95 and supports both PRMan and BMRT. Features include: Full NURBS-based 3D modeler with Construction Tree, OpenGL support, advanced modeling tools such as interactive trim curves, surface intersections, blending, round, coons, gordon surfaces and I/O in various standard data formats including 3DS, DXF, IGES, Maya, STL, VRML, Lightwave. (Information about the older OpenStep version can also be found at this address.)

• Rhino3D is a Windows (NT or 95) based NURBS modeler which recently added RIB support. Their site has a beta available for download. If you use Rhino, also check out the following related links:

  • J. Aberg's page with tips on using BMRT with Rhino.

  • RhinoRIB is a GUI front end for assigning shaders to Rhino objects, setting BMRT rendering options, etc.

  • RhinoMan, which is the beta of RhinoRib2 (a.k.a. Gorilla).

• Maya/Alias to RenderMan

  • Alias/Wavefront's Maya is a popular high-end animation package. It comes with a script to output scenes to RIB, but that script sucks rocks.

  • Pixar's MTOR is a Maya plugin that delivers truly amazing RenderMan output of scenes/animations modeled in Maya.

  • Gestel's DriveMan converts IGES and Alias Wire files to RenderMan, for use with either PRMan or BMRT. There's both a freeware version and a more complete commercial version.

• 3D Studio Max to RenderMan

  • MaxMan (Animal Logic's 3DSMax-to-RenderMan tool).

  • 3DS2RIB is an Autodesk 3D Studio (.3DS) to RenderMan RIB converter by Alex Segal. Binaries for DOS and Linux are available. This really works -- I've tried it and used it successfully.

• Houdini/Prisms

  • Side Effects Software - makers of PRISMS and Houdini, which are commercial modeling/animation systems with good RenderMan support.

  • Houdini and RenderMan gives some hints for using Houdini with RenderMan-compliant renderers.

  • Houdini Tips Page gives some hints for using Houdini and BMRT together, using PRMan's curves for hair, and other Houdini and RenderMan-related tips.

  • Nicholas Yue has several utilities for Houdini users, including scripts that generate the *.ds files for Houdini given BMRT or RDC shaders, and a RIB filter that generates the missing Declare statements to enable BMRT to work quietly with Houdini output. He's also got an ocean wave tutorial.

  • HaRM acts as in intermediary between PRMan and hscript (text only Houdini!). HaRM fires up hscript as its needed, and extracts the rib code from SOP's. Written by Ian Stephenson.

• SoftImage

  • SoftMan(TM) (Animal Logic's Softimage-to-RenderMan tool) information and demos.

  • SoRender is a SoftImage-to-RenderMan converter that was written by David Walvoord when he was a student (he's now at Blue Sky Studios).

• LtoR is a NewTek's Lightwave 3D plugin to output RIB. The web page is in Japanese, but the software reportedly works fine and has its UI in English.

• Hash Animation Master

• RIB export plugin for Hash Animation Master '99 by Mike Hough.

• XFROG is a really nice tree and plant modeling package, which can output RIB (among other formats). It runs on SGI and Linux, with a Windows version forthcoming.

• AC3D is a nice, free polygon-based modeling system that exports RIB. Free or shareware (depending on platform), and supports Linux, Windows, SGI, and Sun. I recommend it.

• Mops is a free modeling environment which can write RIB files. It's available precompiled for SGI, Linux, and NT.

• Sced, a constraint-based CSG modeler which outputs RIB, from Stephen Chenney.

• ShellyLib2.0 is a shell-shape-generator which outputs RIB (among other formats).

• VTK Bill Lorensen's OO scientific visualization toolkit can now output RIB.

• Font3D is sort of a "poor man's Typestry." It can take ASCII text strings and True Type fonts, and turn them into 3-D letters, exporting RIB (among other formats). I used this for the logo on the BMRT home page, and it really works just fine.

• Shade is a modeler/renderer that, among other things, claims to be able to export its object models as RIB. It runs under NT. More details are available from its WWW site.

• Geometique is a subdivision surface modeler that can output RIB. It runs under NT. More details are available from its WWW site.

• PartSyt is a particle systems development library by Jonathan Merritt, which is geared toward outputting RenderMan-compliant scenes.

• Reptile Labour Project has a particle system called flow that outputs to RenderMan/BMRT. Very nice still and animations. He also has a page flipper and some other cool utilities on his page.

• mi2rib is a MentalRay-to-RenderMan converter.

• Okino Computer Graphics, Inc. has two products called the 'NuGraf Rendering System' and 'PolyTrans', which include Renderman export capability. It can convert from DXF, 3D Studio, Lightwave, OpenFlight, IGES 5.3, Wavefront, SoftImage and many more (the latter 3 formats allow output of trimmed NURBS to Renderman in a clean form). Output of animation data from Lightwave and 3D Studio to Renderman will follow in v2.1 of PolyTrans. A demo and other info are available from the WWW site.

• Converters from Inventor2.0 and VRML to RenderMan and BMRT by Cow House.

• Pov2Rib is a POV to RIB converter.

• Not a modeler, but a GUI front-end for controlling BMRT, MoonShot by Blockhead Ventures. A free trial version is available for download.

• A Plugin for Moray will output RIB. Moray is a modeler for POV-Ray. Only geometry is exported, and only for the simple primitives.

• K-3D - a GPL modeling and animation system for Linux and Windows, can export RIB (presumably for any Rman-compliant renderer, but mainly meant for BMRT).

• Poser 4 is a human shape and pose modeler from Curious Labs Inc. which supports animation, clothing, and exchanging body parts with various 3D objects. It runs on Mac, PowerMac, and Windows. It can export RIB. (note: the RIB export was fixed by a patch which had the unfortunate timing of coming out right before BMRT's path convention was changed to UNIX-style, thus exported RIB files will require hand editing where texture maps are called)

• pIXELS 3D is a fairly inexpensive Mac-only spline-based modeling and rendering program that can write RIB files. It has a GUI based ShaderMaker which is flexible enough that most SL shaders can be implemented within the program. User's with the CodeWarrior compiler can also write shaders in C. The pIXELS 3D people have ambitions of writing a fast, Renderman compliant Mac-only render called Tempest.

Shader Sources, SL-related Tools, and Info

• The book The book Texturing and Modeling: a Procedural Approach, 2nd edition by David Ebert, Ken Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steve Worley (Academic Press, 1994, ISBN 0-12-228760) is a great source for people who are interested in procedural texturing. Two chapters have examples in RenderMan Shading Language.

• The Valis Group sells their shaders and looks, still carries Showplace and MacRenderMan on CD, and other RenderMan-related utilities. Check out their WWW pages for product into.

• 3dJoy (the software formerly knows as VIDI Presenter) is a free modeling, animation and rendering system for Power Macintosh. It features a rich set of tools, including spline meshes, CSG, plug-ins and support for several rendering options: Raytracer, Phong, MacRenderMan and BMRT.

• Cinema Graphics sells a program called "Shade Tree" that is a dataflow interface to creating shaders.

• Stephen May's RMan Notes page has a lot of RenderMan goodies, including a Shading Language mode for emacs, and a tutorial on generating various kinds of patterns in Shading Language. Steve now works for Pixar.

• TKMatman is a tool that lets you interactively set and adjust parameters to RenderMan shaders and preview images with the given parameters. I recommend taking a look at this nice freeware package written by Andreas Butz.

• Tutorial on Ray Tracing with BMRT by Jonathan Merritt.

• ShadeIT is a free utility designed to work with a Renderman compliant renderer to preview shaders.

• ShaderLister will create sliders, and input fields corresponding to the parameters of a shader. It will also create a preview button which can be pressed to invocate rendrib.

• slcEditor is yet another shader parameter tweaker.

Developer's Tools and Alternate Bindings

• Java Bindings for RenderMan from Sean Cier.

• A Perl 5 binding for RenderMan available from Glenn Lewis. Also, Ron Mayer has a page demonstrating the Perl binding.

• Terry - a Python binding for RenderMan.

• SnakeMan - another Python binding for RenderMan, by Jeff Newquist.

• Adam - a Tcl binding for RenderMan by Michael Johnson. Requires Tcl/Tk 8.0.

• Cinema Graphics sells a program called "Shade Tree" that is a dataflow interface to creating shaders.

• Converters from Inventor2.0 and VRML to RenderMan & BMRT by Cow House.

• The Affine Toolkit by Thomas E. Burge contains a number of RIB filters and massagers, including binary RIB dumping and conversion utilities, utilities to parameterize NURBS in RIB files by arc length, polish up RIB files generated by Alias, etc.

• RenderWrapper (RW) is a simple Tcl/Tk script for conveniently setting the parameters for the rendrib, rgl, and rendribv renderers from BMRT. It provides a GUI for rendering single or multiple frames in wireframe, polygon, and photorealistic modes. RW runs on Unix and Windoze95/NT systems, and is free for downloading.

• MAM/VRS is a 3-D graphics library written in C++. It actually consists of two parts: (1)The Virtual Rendering System (VRS) is a wrapper for different rendering systems. Currently it supports OpenGL, VRML and RenderMan. (2)The Modeling and Animation Machine (MAM) provides higher-level modeling and animation, such as different GUI-Toolkits (Motif, Tcl/Tk, Qt, Gtk, MFC).

• Edmonds is a utility that takes a simple expression language and "compiles" it into the opcodes that PRMan's RiBlobby primitive requires. Written by Ian Stephenson.

• sdpslparse, from K-3D, is a utility that parses the source code of a shader and generate XML that describes the names, types, and default values of the shader's parameters.

Links related to setting up distributed "render farms"

• Project BORG (BMRT Ordinary Rendering GUI) is a front-end GUI for running BMRT, featuring a network job distribution facility (both for distributing frames of an animation as well as splitting up a single frame). The alpha runs now on Linux, Solaris, and IRIX with Win95/98/NT support coming soon. There's also an eGroups BORG discussion.

• Batch rendering and job control -- frequently people ask about how to set up render farms, distributed batch rendering, job queueing, etc. Here are some distributed job management systems which, while not rendering-specific, may be useful:
  • An index of several batch queueing systems
  • Portable Batch System - a batch system developed at NASA Ames and available free.

• renderFarm - a distributed batch rendering tool (designed for use with BMRT) by Alexei Puzikov.

People, Places, Projects

• Katsuaki Hiramitsu - hero of the RenderMan User's Group meeting at SIGGRAPH '99. Be sure to poke around his home page, especially My RenderMan Study and My IMAGE Made with RenderMan, and listings of Katsu's shaders.

• Studios Using PRMan and/or BMRT for films:
  • Cinesite
  • Digital Domain
  • Fleeting Image Animation
  • Hammerhead Productions
  • Industrial Light+Magic
  • Manex Visual Effects
  • Manhatten Transfer
  • Metrolight
  • Pixar
  • Weta Digital

• Visualization Shading Project at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). This site has some MPEGS of visualizations of that were rendered using BMRT, using some very nice volumetric shaders by David Bock of NCSA. David's project and images were featured in Computer Graphics World, in both the April '99 "Insight" column (last page), as well as the May '99 "Tech Watch" column (pp. 15-16).

• Along similar scientific lines, see the NCAR Scientific Computing Division's visualizations. The Ozone Hole visualizations were prepared with Bill Lorensen's VTK and rendered using BMRT.

• Fleeting Image Animation - Scott Johnston uses BMRT to make some really wonderful non-photorealistic imagery. Come to our SIGGRAPH '98 course, "Advanced RenderMan: Beyond the Companion," to hear Scott talk about his techniques.

• At the Ohio State ACCAD, Stephen May taught a course on digital lighting which used Pixar's PRMan and BMRT. Their RMan Notes page has a lot of RenderMan goodies, including a Shading Language mode for emacs, and a little tutorial on generating various kinds of patterns in Shading Language. It's worth looking at their Animation Language (AL), as well as their work in Anatomy-Based Modeling of the Human Musculature, for which they used both PRMan and BMRT for rendering the video that went along with their SIGGRAPH paper on the topic. [Note: Steve May is now at Pixar.]

• Nick Foster of U. Penn (now at PDI) has done some great work on animating liquids and gasses. His Siggraph paper and animations on gas animation used BMRT for rendering the volumetric gases.

• Wayne Wooten of the Georgia Tech GVU Lab taught an advanced computer graphics class in which the students are making images and animations using BMRT. View their student projects. There's some pretty cool stuff here. [Note: Wayne is now at Pixar, across the hall from lg.]

• Wave's home page . Wave (a.k.a. Michael B. Johnson of the MIT Media Lab) does a lot of cool work on animation systems, and has built his WavesWorld system on top of RenderMan. He also has a RenderMan binding for Tcl. Wave is a real power user of BMRT, has a real knack for finding obscure bugs, and is also one of my favorite people, so take a look at his cool stuff. [Note: Wave is now at Pixar.]

• Morwen Thistlethwaite, a professor of mathematics at the U. of Tennessee, Knoxville, uses BMRT to render visualizations of packings and knots. Check out his home page above for links to his visualization images.

Miscellaneous

• libtiff - Sam Leffler's TIFF library -- essential for TIFF reading and writing.
• Looking for textures? Or need reference images when creating procedural textures? Try some of these:
  • Sources of planetary textures: JPL, James Hastings-Trew, More planet textures, C. Thomas, Bjorn Jonsson
  • Axem Textures
  • Textures
  • Textures
  • Rob's Granite Page - look under "images" for some good reference photos of different kinds of granite.
  • Wood species (actually about cabinetry)
  • Marble and Granite, Inc.
  • Alpha Granite & Marble, Inc.
  • Texture Land

• Monthly raytracing competition. Even though it's sponsored by POV, you can use any raytracer to render your entries. Very few entries have used BMRT, but I can't help but think that entries from a renderer which supports programmable shading, radiosity, and atmospheric effects would just kick butt (hint, hint).

• Tips on using BMRT with MS Visual C++ 4.0