![]() Since inception, the program's powers have grown-what used to take all night on a render farm for Toy Story can now be accomplished in real time-but Pixar filmmakers like Coco's Lee Unkrich are still using it to push the limits of visual storytelling, without sacrificing emotional payoff. And when Pixar ventured into making features, RenderMan proved to be as central to the studio's animation efforts as it was to Hollywood's most innovative live-action films. ![]() ![]() The team behind RenderMan also helped pioneer everything from motion blur to path tracing to subsurface scattering-effects that added so much incredible realism it's hard to imagine today's movies without them. That's not to say that the software was simply a visual front-end. RenderMan, though, allowed effects artists to realize their visions without needing to write code. "Up until that point," says Catmull, "the look, the lighting, essentially had to be done by programmers." A movie like 1982's Tron might have been mindblowing, but its digital sequences also necessitated an absolutely knee-buckling amount of work, creating its futuristic effects frame by frame. It started as a powerful algorithm, but then became something greater-a graphical interface. One limitation that currently exists is that we don't support material layering via MaterialX.RenderMan, as it's known, came out of ILM's computer graphics team (the same one that would later spin off into its own company called Pixar). Because each renderer is different, the picture you get from RenderMan with a given MaterialX network may vary from the picture you get from another renderer with the same network. The plugin also connects Maya with RenderMan Pro Server in new ways, leading to fast interactive results without the need of writing RIB. PxrSurface can represent most of what MaterialX defines. RenderMan for Maya (RfM) provides easy access to RenderMan features via either a Maya-centric workflow (including Maya-style pattern nodes, etc.) or in conjunction with the other tools. The Physically Based Shading Nodes you use in your MaterialX graphs are all converted to PxrSurface and then passed to RenderMan. RenderMan supports OSL patterns, so all of the patterns you use in your MaterialX networks are converted to RenderMan via OSL and should run exactly as you expect. As the materials flow through RenderMan's Hydra Renderer Delegate, they are passed through the MaterialX ShaderGen system to be transformed into native RenderMan materials. USD and Hydra take the MaterialX material definitions and assign them to the relevant pieces of geometry. ![]() RenderMan supports MaterialX via USD and Hydra. MaterialX only provides guidance to each renderer, and each renderer will do their best to match the intent of the material in the best way that they can. ![]() Because there are many renderers in this world, each approaching the challenge of rendering from a different perspective, MaterialX doesn't guarantee a pixel match between renderers. Each renderer that supports MaterialX takes the material definitions and either renders them directly or converts them to an internal representation. It provides definitions around a set of Physically Based Shading Nodes, as well as a set of pattern nodes (like texture nodes, procedural noise, etc) that you can use to build up a material. MaterialX is a ASWF standard for the material definition and exchange between renderers. The Open Chess Set ( authored by Moeen and Mujtaba Sayed, contributed to MaterialX by SideFX, rendered in RenderMan for Houdini within Solaris ) ![]()
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