Hi,
I have recently been reading up about rendering, and I came upon the REYES rendering algorithm. The thing is, I got a little confused; I do know that REYES is a micro-polygon rendering algorithm, can a rendering program render scenes using both ray tracing and REYES? Does REYES mean that I don’t have to subsurf and smooth my models before rendering?
(Although I doubt it,) Does Blender render have REYES capability?
Thanks for the replies! I did know about Aqsis and Pixie, but I didn’t really look too much into them. Both look pretty good, but does anyone have any recommendations between the two?
If you want raytracing, pixie would be the choice for now,
otherwise I believe aqsis to be more full-featured and more actively developed
(pixie’s developer was hired by pixar some time ago, IIRC).
There’s also 3Delight which is not open source(it also includes raytracing & is quite feature-full),
but offers a single-license for free to get started out, limited to only 2 threads,
but certainly the only reyes renderer faster is prman from pixar, so for starters it a good deal.
Go with 3delight, you get a free liscense for a single user, I would also recommend you get a good book on Renderman the are not that many about five or six but trust me you will need a book, this is a particularly complex render engine don’t think you will make sense of some of the more complex topics without a good book on the subject. I have Rendering for beginners and its a fairly good book I will probabley pick up one on shader writing soon. But I currently have way too many books to read so it could be next year that I do.
Some of the books are fairly outdated but I believe the are still useful, also get your hands on as many siggraph course pdfs as you can, the will come in handy. If you want to get into shaders than some basic knowledge of something like c will go a long way. RSL shares a bit of syntax with c so it helps in reading shader code.
Unless you’re already working as a professional in the 3D industry and you like programming using a Renderman based renderer won’t make any sense at all. It is way too complex to do small projects. Anyway, I like Aqsis more than Pixie (mostly bcuz it’s hard to find the compiled files) and 3Delight. I hate interfaces that have to be controlled by Terminal only …