Mingxuan Render
From Kwicky
Contents |
[edit] Overview
- 3DELIGHT - RenderMan
- http://www.3delight.com/en/
- Commercial Renderer, requires license to install, first license is free
- OS: Windows, Linux,Mac OS X
- User's Manual: http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight.html
[edit] Features
[edit] Renderer style
1.The rendering engine implements a fast scanline renderer, coupled with an on-demand ray tracer. It adopts true ray tracing hider to trace primary rays instead of using REYES.
2. Multiple shadow maps can be aggregated into one single shadow map file for easier access. This can serve, for example, to store six shadow maps in one file for point light shadows.
3. It implements types of global illluminationIn such as ambient occlusion, photon mapping,and subsurface scattering.
4. It support for a large number of geometric models including NURBS, bilinear and bicubic patches, subdivision surfaces, particles, curves etc.
5. 3DELIGHT shaders are written in RenderMan Shading Language (SL). 3DELIGHT also supports most of the common extensions to this language.
[edit] Interface
There are two ways to describe a scene to 3DELIGHT: the first is by using the RenderMan Application Programming Interface (API) and the second is by using the RenderMan Interface Bytestream (RIB) files. The RenderMan API and the RIB format are well described in RenderMan Interface Version 3.2. This document is available electronically at https://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/index.htm. A RIB file is a set of commands meant to be interpreted by a RIB reader such as renderdl. There is almost a one to one correspondence between the API calls and RIB commands.
[edit] Examples
Here are some examples that came with 3Delight.
Teapot
top without subsurface scattering[0.44 secs] bottom subsurface scattering [11.52 secs]
Shadows[8.32 secs]
[edit] My Test Scene
The scene is a mixture of the models from "cornell" and "teapot" examples. It shows:
- Indirect Lightning
- Ray traced shadows
- Transparency
Rendering time: [22.73 secs]
I learned some of the RenderMan grammar to revise the RIB files. It could be downloaded here [1]
[edit] Experience
The render is easy to use with scene files provided. I use RIB format as the scene file. In my experience, it takes time to tune parameters in the RIB file. First, the coordination system is strange, which is a left hand system,where x is towards right, y is up and z is into screen. You have to think hard how to move the object to fit it in the screen. Lights and cameras are also tricky. Changing materials is relatively easy. It seems you have to learn a lot about Renderman to render a good scene you want.
