Is renderman worth it?

[sandra7]

Is renderman worth learning scripts and not having a gui? From what I heard it is a pain in the ass and hard to implement. What are your thoughts?

[mestela]

PRman is worth it if you need it. If you need to render at film res, with good anti-aliasing, motion blur and displacement, and _fast_, that's what it's designed for. Because that feature list targets largish film fx houses with in house programming staff, it's correspondingly pricey and complex to use.

3rd parties have written tools to make PRman a little easier though. Animal logic have softMan and maxMan, plugins that allow you to do all your work in softimage and max respectively, then export the whole shebang to PRman, no (or at least minimal) RIB knowledge required. There's others, like MTOR for maya, but logic's tools are more cleanly implemented, from what I've heard. No word on if they're developing a mayaMan however.

-matt

[dan-mcfarland]

With Renderman Artist Tools, Rat, of which MTOR is a part, you only need to do some mel scripting. I had never donre any scripting befor I began to learn Mtor. It is difficult to learn but its use is actualy quite easy. Once you switch tho Mtor I cant imagine going back to Maya rendering.

Dan

[blk]

i figure ill ask it here
i knwo theres the dreamworks plug in that can do this but i dont think its for sale and i heard it was only on sgi machines
is there or are there any mel scripts out there that will say take a fully textured maya model (useing texturemaps and such) and convert it to renderman shaders so that it will render out directly in renderman with out haveing to remake the shaders

i think thats the only thing lackeing from MTOR is this even more direct connection

[aka-maze]

My response to this would be one of the following depending on the situation:

1) if you are switching to prman in the middle of a production, don't. Continue to use maya, finding workarounds with A|W's help, if you pay support that's what it's for.

2) Take the time to learn MTOR. Any automatic shader conversion will still require that you learn the system, and you will be a better (and more marketable) CG artist for it. Learn how to apply textures to models before relying ona script to do it for, because if something goes wrong (and it will) you may be able to track the problem down.

3) The DreamWorks conversion utility is a script that ships as an extra with MTOR. In my opinion it is shabby and unrteliable. The script that I wrote (available here) is a bit of an improvement, but you will still need to go back and tweak all of your specular/diffuse and bump settings, (and if you need tiled textures forget it).

HTH
Adam

[blk]

well thats what im doing im trying to learn MTOR and Renderman as much as i can i was just doing test renders and noticed my nurbs model of my character cam eout alot smother in renderman than in mayas render (little subtle things i notice in the smoothness) and i was just playing around useing a default renderman shader clay i beleive and was hopeing i could see my character in all his textured glory rendered in renderman

i have no plans of useing renderman in my demo reel but like you said if i can go into a job interview and say yes i have a good foundation in MTOR and Renderman i think that gives me a slight edge

Ill admit its hard though ive only done some basic programming (gwbasic, qbasic, and turbo pascal) and its been years since i did so its hard trying to write your own shaders but i really want to learn it so as soon as i et closer to finishing my reel ill put more time into it