RenderMan tests with MOSAIC using Pixie and Aqsis

[WHiTeRaBBiT]

Hey guys,
just thought I'd show off a couple of test renders I did in preparation for another release of MOSAIC a RenderMan exporter I've been working on. These are part of several test renders in 3Delight, Air, Aqsis and Pixie to test the built in shader system I've recently added. They are primarily meant to demonstrate using heavy displacement maps to create complex form on a simple SDS frame and then adding high res normal maps on top to create very fine detail for close ups These models are heavily modified version of the ones from the guys at headus.
This render is using Pixie's ambient occlusion through the occlusion() function with a single soft shadow distant light. The Killeroo is using a ref (diffuse) map, specular map, hard map, color map, displacement map and normal map. The scene was bucket rendered on a 10 node 1.8ghz athlon 512meg render farm in 35 mins:



This next one is an attempt to create the same look with Aqsis using a distant shadow map and their depth map based occlusion. This is the same scene as the raytraced Pixie version but with raytracing attributes removed and a shadow map pass for the distant and 50 512x512 spot light maps configured in a hemisphere, it was rendered on a 3ghz P4 4gig in 1.3 hours:



Both scenes were built in Blender using standard Lamp, Material and World controls and exported with MOSAIC with absolutely no custom code fragments or such. You can read my blog about current MOSAIC developments (as well as other great Blender to RenderMan project blogs) here:
http://blendertorenderman.blogspot.com/
as well as see other test renders here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dreamsca...AICTestRenders
or you can download MOSAC and read the manual (all about to be updated) here:
http://ribmosaic.wiki.sourceforge.net/

>WHiTeRaBBiT<

[Brammie22]

Is this a test?
This is just AWESOME!
I like your style!
Greetz,
Brammie22

[Photoguy]

gallery! This is awesome!
I think i like the Aqsis one better.

[paya]

Hat off maaan it's great
You said that you are working one shader system for mosaic? wow......where will be released?

[WHiTeRaBBiT]

Thanks for the comments
paya:
Right now the CVS copy already has the built in shaders, everything you would expect works, but you still need to have some basic knowledge of RenderMan to know what some of MOSAIC's controls are all about. If you know how to use CVS you can get a copy in my sourceforge site here: http://ribmosaic.wiki.sourceforge.net/
MOSAIC's still in Beta so things are still changing ALOT, but I hope to release another Beta download package and completely update the Wiki manual and examples in 1 to 2 weeks

[paya]

WhiteRabbit: it sounds very promising I am planning to use blender with pixie in our pipeline. Your script is the best choice

[shul]

Amazing; I think Pixie looks better.. can u post other renderer's work? (wonder how maxwell and those will look like..)

[WHiTeRaBBiT]

At the moment I'm adding more controls to the exporter to fine tune what gets exported. Before all of the internal structural RIB was not controllable, but now there are switches for turning off common RIB structure such as RiFrameBegin/End, ect...
Now that there's more control I'm adding other more exotic renderers (not strictly compliant), such as Gelato, Lucille, JrMan, PBRT, LuxRender, ect. Basically any renderer that uses RIB and has at least basic RenderMan compatibility should work (with varying degrees of tweaking)
I'll continue to post test renders in the above blog and picasa photo album

[shul]

Originally Posted by WHiTeRaBBiT I'll continue to post test renders in the above blog and picasa photo album

That would be great

[Ace Dragon]

Clearly shows the power of the Renderman renderers.

I looked at the overview of the Mosaic interface and all the path stuff makes it seem hard to use.

[WHiTeRaBBiT]

MOSAIC hit the forums way to early in my opinion
At this point the CVS version is almost 3 months newer then the download version and wiki manual. I release an update every 3 - 9 days so that gives you an idea of how much has changed since then. The current CVS version is worlds different then that initial release

Hopefully I'm only a few weeks from releasing another download package and completely re-writing the wiki manual to reflect everything thats changed. For instance the paths are still there but you only have to select your renderer in a preset list and MOSAIC automatically fills them in. If your using a strongly compliant RenderMan renderer such as 3Delight, Air, Aqsis, Pixie then you even have built in shaders that use most Light, Material and World settings automatically. That means for raytraced renderers theres built-in support for soft shadows, area lights, glossy fresnel reflection, refraction, occlusion, HDRI indirect occlusion. Also for all renderers that can use the default shaders theres material channels (ref, spec, hard, mir, ect), sequence textures, all light types (including a light array that simulates Blenders area light) and attenuations, all fog settings, background (no gradients yet). I'm also building utilities to automatically build map passes for the pure Reyes renderers out there (which allows interesting things such as shadow maps based SSS). Right now most things you need to do can be done right in Blender without hardly even touching the settings in MOSAIC (with the right renderers).

Of course none of the new features will be documented until I reach a place that I can do another official release. Even with all this RenderMan IS still complicated to use (thats kinda the point of it), but its not as hard to learn as you might think

Whoever out there is looking for an super easy renderer to use then RenderMan IS NOT for you, but if your looking for a flexible renderer that can render anything from massive still images on 300 computers (bucket rendering), to complex animations (where you need extreme controls over every detail), or your wanting to use a scientific paper to write a shader that nobodies every tried before or ***put whatever you can imagine here*** then RenderMan IS for you

[Ace Dragon]

BI recently got Blurry Reflections/Refractions, Soft Shadows, anisotropic reflections, QMC AO and there was a patch for good Image Based Lighting.

The new AAO algorithm has the capability for a single light bounce as well for colorbleeding. And you can thank Brecht and Broken for all these things. Blendernation said before Broken also did an initial implementation of a raytrace node which can use a texture to affect anisotropic direction and glossiness which he hasn't submitted yet.

You can also now create shaders from new .pdf papers with the new PyNode.

[WHiTeRaBBiT]

Here's some more test renders

This is me trying (very poorly) to achieve a similar effect in Blender's internal, I think much better/faster results could've been achieved using the sculpt tool instead of high res SDS and displacement maps. Also the ground in the RenderMan versions are heavily displaced but it was just too costly to do in Blender without micropoly's
Stats: 2cores@2.2ghz_duo2_4gig@10.6hrs



With the addition of new exporter controls I've successfully used MOSAIC with Gelato. It can read RIB files just fine but uses its own GSL instead of RSL for its shading language, because of this the default shaders won't work directly but can be translated by hand which is what I did here.
Stats: 2cores@2.2ghz_duo2_4gig-GeForce8500GT_512meg@1.1hrs



Heres 3Delight (a commercial RenderMan renderer), not much to say other then it looks good as usual for this renderer
Stats: 1core@3ghz_P4_4gig@2.3hrs



And finally Air (another commercial renderer), this one only has normal mapping applied. This is because for some weird reason they have the renderer set to either do normals or displacements but not both at the same time It looked far better with normals because of the details so I choose normals instead of displacements for this one
Stats: 1core@3ghz_P4_4gig@2.7hrs



Thats all the testing I plan on doing tor this project file, If you follow the blogspot above I also have a test render for the Lucille GI RenderMan renderer still under development

[Ace Dragon]

You could use a combination of sculpt, displacement, and normal maps for the BI one, SVN has object to object ray and displacement baking.

I've achieved rather good displacement in BI on ground by subdividing only the ground close to the camera, but seriously how hard would it be to code adaptive subdivision where if distance of face from camera < X, subsurf level for face + 1 or something like that in BI?

[thedaemon]

Looking good. Keep up the good work!
CD:
Does blender have a lod function? That's what lod should do.

[shr1k]

I have been using Mosaic for a week or so with 3Dlight (They will give you a free license for 1 computer its a little tricky to setup but it your renders look allot better without a water mark) Your renders look great and the times are good to. Mosaic is by far the best and easiest to use .rib exporter for Blender. Keep up the great work and thanks.

[daredemo]

Could you update the examples so that they would work with current SVN and or RC1

[CubOfJudahsLion]

I have no words for saying how much MOSAIC, and your work show here, rock. I'm applauding your automatic translation of default shaders. Very good work in all areas, including the scene setup and modeling modifications.

[WHiTeRaBBiT]

daredemo:
I'm currently holding development in 2.45 until 2.46 is officially released as I am still in the middle of heavy programming. The problem is there is currently no Python API for the new particles system in 2.46 and the devs are still up in the air as to whether their going to add any support at all or if so how long it will take. What I'm going to do is wait until 2.46 is officially released and see if anything changes in the last minute, if they don't add an API I'll see if I can make this version compatible with both 2.45 and 2.46 (that way I can use the displacement and normal map baking in the new version but the particles in the old version). If it looks like nobody is going to add support until 2.47 or (God forbid) 2.5 I may look at Blender's source and see if I can offer a temporary hack to get the new particles at least working with the current API (if the devs interested that is).
I can promise some sort of support for the new version but not until its released

[daredemo]

I'd be happy even if temporarly there's no particles. Right now, the examples crash blender svn, at load time.