uh… i know this is dev. But it feels like it should be in forum gallery!
I think the 3Delight version looks the best, but I’d put Mosaic second in that group. Granted, I don’t know what results the others could produce with some tweaking, but the Mosaic version looks wonderful.
whoooooaaaaa! I can’t believe I had missed this!!! WhiteRabbit, amazing, superb, outstanding, no-words-to-describe-it work! 
Glad to see Mosaic alive and kicking harder than ever!
Regards,
Alvaro
I’m just stunned by the difference in render time. Gelato’s render looks really good to me and it only took 1.1hrs to render…compare that to BI…a 10x speedup is amazing. And I’ve only heard negative things about Gelato recently. But even compared to the other renderman renderers it’s twice as fast. Go Gelato, Go!
Well to be fair that Gelato scene’s occlusion settings are so low the ambiance is almost flat, I was having issues getting it to work right because it uses it own shader language 
I noticed overall performance for GPU rendering is only marginally faster then CPU rendering. I think Nvidia is really looking more to the future assuming GPU’s will continue to get faster until there even faster then CPU’s (especially considering their fine tuned for 3D math). Another interesting thing about using GPU’s is if you already have a farm you could instantly double its power by adding video cards at a fraction of the cost of adding more nodes! Of course you have to have the paid version for that (which means paying large amounts per node).
the beauty of Renderman is TRUE displacement one polygon smaller than a screen pixel.
Blender has in no way anything of that - and cannot render it as detailed as well.
It simply lacks the resolution.
Wasnt there a test build with true displacement for BI?
“Quite Dune” was a project for micropoly’s in Blender but I think its development has stopped
I know most people here may disagree but I think RenderMan’s greatest strength is not the technology it renders with but the way the technology is accessed, shader language and RIB scene description is an extremely flexible and powerful way to do 3D (as long as you have good tools to generate and edit them). With a combination of good rendering technologies and a flexible and open ended way of accessing them there is practically no limit to what can be engineered or rendered 
I think one of the most exciting things about Open Source RenderMan is simply having access to the technologies and ideas that the professionals use, but without having to work in a large studio to get to it 
hi,
great work that make me discovering pixie render, i’ve installed pixie from the installer and placed the mosaic python script in my script folder.
after that, i’ve setting up mosaic with:
- outpt directory > to my desktop > that should be ok !
- renderder binary > C:\Programs files\Pixie\bien\rndr.exe ?
is that wrong ? cause when i press the render scene button, it say: “error, please setup the output directory and render man binay…”
i’ve missed something, but what ?
i hope to test the script shortly, it’s promising a lot !
i use: blender 2.45.15 Rinky - python 2.5
thanks,
bye
I would strongly recommend using the CVS version of MOSAIC instead of the download package, since the download is many months old now
If you don’t know how to use CVS you can also download just the py with your browser, click to download here:
http://ribmosaic.cvs.sourceforge.net/checkout/ribmosaic/mosaic/mosaic.py
Once you’ve cranked up the CVS version just goto the “MOSAIC Settings” tab and select “Pixie” in the “Renderer Preset” list and this will automatically setup everything for you
If you still want to use the old version you will need to fill in all the binaries in the “MOSAIC Settings” tab, so for Pixie it would be:
Renderer Binary = rndr
Shader Compiler = sdrc
Texture Optimizer = texmake
Shader Info = sdrinfo
Then it should stop complaining
Hi, WhiteRabbit,
thanks for the link, the CVS version is full optimized for Pixie nice one !
it works great !!!
Then, with Mosaic, is there any fonctionnalities from renders (i talk about all of them) any renderMan like ?
but my question is more about Pixie that i decided to work on…
Thanks anyway, your UIdesign script is a beauty !
Bye
If I understand your question… because of the way MOSAIC works its possible to set it up to use anything that any of the renderers offer, but it can get very complicated to setup though.
In general most basic raytracing features and material/light settings should work right away with the default shaders for the raytraced renderers. For the true Reyes renderers I’m currently working on mapping utilities for automatically generating render passes for things like shadow mapping, caustic mapping, occlusion mapping, environment mapping, ect. Then I will probably add render pass utilities for raytracing stuff like photon map passes for caustics, occlusion and color bleeding. I’m avoiding any feature thats specific to only one renderer, so some of the most advanced features for any particular renderer will need to be setup by hand (such as Pixie’s brickmap features).
Unfortunately It’ll be kinda hard to figure out what MOSAIC does directly in Blenders interface and what has to be setup by hand until I get the Wiki manual updated
You could try the killeroo BI render again using Kai Kostock’s adaptive subdivision script in the python forum, he’s currently working on hardcoding it into Blender.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=119216
I have tried the Bl Killeroo using multires with much better results (still took a very long time to render), I bet it would probably be faster with adaptive subdivision though
In either case my goal is NOT to bring RenderMan capabilities to Blender’s internal but to help connect Blender to the broader world of RenderMan (both commercial and open source). There are alot of great people who have dedicated years of there lives to bring Open Source RenderMan to us
The bottom line is this is not a competition, each renderer has its pros and cons depending of what your trying to do. If you want a photo-realistic render use Indigo or LuxRender, if you want complete integration use Blender’s internal, you want tighter integration with more advanced features use Yafray, if you want to experiment with an industry standard play with RenderMan, ect, ect…
Wow…
The renderings are just amazing!!!
Hi!
I’m (hopefully) going to be working on a small animated short soon and I was investigating using Renderman (If its good enough for Pixar…).
I’d had a play with Mosaic before and ran into a few problems with creating shaders.
Do you know if there is a good, SIMPLE non-programmer freindly way of creating simple RIB files - such as for example a UV map texture with one or two different layers for displacement and so forth?
I used Blenders internal UV Mapping coords and got some strange results, but this was about 3 months ago or so.
As always I’d strongly suggest using the latest CVS of MOSAIC and the latest version of your renderer (preferably source built)
The last release has much tighter integration with the built in shaders to support things like textures on multiple channels but with some restrictions:
- You can only use one UV set on the mesh
- You can only use one texture per channel
- The textures usually need to be .tif (for most renderers)
- The textures either need to be Packed or use absolute pathsFor a better description of the current features and built in shader support (albeit unstructured) see the tutorial blogs here. A great way to start playing with shaders right away is to build the shader libraries that come with MOSAIC, go here for how to build a shader library. If your wanting to build your own shaders visually using nodes you can either use SLER or shaderman.next. Ultimately I think the best way is actually learning RSL and RIB by taking it slow, getting some good references and picking apart the shader sources that come in the shader library with MOSIAC (but then again I’m a programmer so whatever works for you).
I’m currently working on redesigning several large systems in MOSAIC to optimize export of large amounts of data (such as hair and dense meshes). When I’m done with that I planning on reworking the built in shaders to make integration with materials, lights and world settings as seamless as possible
Hope that helps,
WHiTeRaBBiT
Wow, it does, thank you very much. I was terrified of RIB programming and coding in general. But looking at it, it dosen’t look TOO hard.
I’ll have a play and see what I get. Thanks again!
Hi WHiTeRaBBiT,
do you have a GI Testscene which works in Pixie?
A little room or something like that.
I get it simply not.
Regards,
Norbert
Sorry Norbert I don’t have anything like that at the moment
Right now I’m doing some major overhaul work in MOSIAC’s code base but after this next release I’ll be experimenting with using brickmaps and I’ll be sure to post some results and examples
In Pixie, PrMan (3Delight & Air maybe) you can calculate GI (occlusion and color bleeding) using photon maps/irradiance cacheing or with the newer point cloud/brick mapping methods. Unfortunately every renderer implements these differently making it impossible to integrate to MOSAIC cleanly, its still very possible but will require making and attaching custom code fragments to the scene. If you already know that your not going to want to mess with custom RIB code I strongly recommend trying the blender2pixie script built specifically for Pixie, you can get it here
WHiTeRaBBiT
Hi WHiTeRaBBiT,
thank you very much!
I will try it.
Norbert