Renderman Tutorials

For how prevalent Renderman is in the industry, there is a surprising lack of good tutorials on how to actually use the program. Yes there are good resources for specific aspects of the renderer on Professor Malcolm Kesson's Fundza site and of course Pixar's documentation and help forums... but very few actual "this is how you navigate the interface and start using renderman" tutorials. Even the tutorials on Digital Tutors are sadly outdated. Fortunately, I found a youtube channel put together by one Mark Flanagan, comprised of a series of very useful Renderman tutorials that appear to be only a year old, so certainly applicable to most recent versions of the software. Hooray!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-CQuoQkhOn97SMPjmYJCiHVk7tS3bHMD

The Future of Renderman

Earlier this year Pixar announced some big changes to its long time industry work-horse Renderman. Firstly they  have completely restructured their pricing so that the renderer is free for non-commerical use and much more affordable for commercial - Pixar and Disney have stated they are moving towards a more open-source approach to encourage further development of the software. More importantly, some exciting new technology has been integrated into Renderman - which is now one software package, combining what was previously Renderman Studio and Renderman Pro Server. With some of the new advances in the rendering techniques, Renderman looks to catch up with the times and provide some stiff competition for renderers like Arnold, which in recent years have proved stronger and more production friendly than the then existing versions of Renderman. Based on some of the demos I watched on the Pixar site, the new Renderman can handle very large sets of geometry fairly effortlessly, even during interactive re-rendering. It also combines uni-directional and bi-directional path tracing to provide more flexibility for accurately and efficiently handling different lighting situations.

FxGuide covers some of the discussion as it stood back in May -
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermanris-and-the-start-of-next-25-years/

And some more up-to-date information on the technology that will be part of the new Renderman directly from Pixar's site -
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25847

The new platform was originally projected to be released sometime around Siggraph this August, but according to a recent email from one of the Pixar sales managers, it looks like it won't actually be released until later this fall.


One section I found especially exciting in the FxGuide article was where Ed Catmull discusses how five major research centers - Pixar, ILM, Disney Research, Disney Animation, and the Carnegie Mellon Lab - are now all working together cooperatively to research and develop new and improved rendering solutions. And with the extra effort they are putting into the future of Renderman, you can be certain other developers and researchers will take notice, and we could see some exciting developments for other render engines and rendering as a whole.

FxGuide interview with Marcos Fajardo

The creator of Arnold talks about his renderer and the future of Solid Angle -
http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-193-in-depth-with-arnold-creator-marcos-fajardo/

FxGuide also previously did another interview with Marcos back in February -
http://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcasts/fxpodcast-270-solid-angles-marcos-fajardo-on-arnold/

Some observations for later consideration

We use V-Ray as our primary render engine here at Neoscape, which is great because it's allowing to me to get a much closer look at the ins and outs of how it works in production. I've noticed that some seemingly very small changes can make the difference between a 30 minute render and a 16 hour render (no joke). With that in mind, it would be interesting to do some tests that separate out some individual controls to see how each one specifically effects the render time and quality.

Specifically:
- Color Threshold
- Noise Threshold
- Min/Max Samples
- Adaptive Amount

Some "Beary" Collectible Rockwells

So as I was unpacking a box of trinkets and knick-knacks, I came across this lovely little Boyd's Bear collectible figurine I've had for years. He's a little hockey player done in classic Boyd's style - with torn up clothing and a beat up wooden stick, and very endearing. As I was taking in all the little details, I realized he was an excellent visual reference for the style I'm attempting to achieve - perhaps a little more stylized and exaggerated, but still good reference nonetheless.

Further pondering made me realize I was drawn to the style of the sculpture because it reminded me so much of Rockwell, so much that I began to wonder if perhaps all of the Boyd's Bears were actually inspired by Norman Rockwell's style. A little bit of research and I couldn't find any correlation, at least none that was mentioned. However - I did find that at least three Rockwell tribute bears were created, and you can see in the side by sides how well the two styles work together.

Grandpa's Little Ballerina

Before the Shot/At the Doctor

Doctor and the Doll

Academic Paper Resource

Found this page with links to a good list of papers/dissertations/etc relating to rendering and sampling algorithms, etc.

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Papers

I was actually specifically looking for a paper by Eric Veach, his 1997 Stanford dissertation Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation, for which he was honored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (3rd link on the page under "Books"). Interesting tidbit, Veach was also recently honored by the Academy for his work with deep shadow maps that he did at Pixar - nearly 14 years ago!

Kids have more fun

Found this post with some amazing photos of children around the world caught in the act of, well, being kids :-) . For one it's a great anatomy and pose reference, since finding good references of children can be difficult (especially in this day and age when unfortunately, an innocent internet search can take you places you don't want to go). Furthermore, I love how these photos manage to capture the emotion of each moment and then seem to freeze them in time, much like Rockwell was able to do in so many of his illustrations.

         http://www.boredpanda.com/happy-children-playing/

V-Ray/Arnold Resource

Just stumbled across this website today, the MAXDEPTH page include tutorials and tips/tricks for rendering in both V-Ray and Arnold, as well as a little bit of Zbrush and Mari as well. Looks like a pretty good resource :-)

Also, Grant Warwick's Mastering V-Ray is another good V-Ray resource. The full course costs money, but even the 2 free videos he has posted on the page are quite useful. And although he uses V-Ray for 3ds Max, the general principles are the same and can be applied to V-Ray for Maya (for the most part).

V-Ray Material Resource

Came across this excellent resource on the basics of V-Ray materials with renders to illustrate the different attributes. The whole website (viscorbel.com) is overall a good resource. The V-Ray tutorials are all for 3ds Max, but I found most of the principles applied for V-Ray in Maya as well.

http://viscorbel.com/vray-materials-theory/

Character Updates

So my characters are pretty much done! Only things left to do are: n-cloth for the clothes, which will be done after rigging/posing; hair, which I am still figuring out how to do; some surface detail on the girl's sweater, which I may end up combining with the texturing process; and the little girl's shoes, which I'm having to re-do no thanks to some major wonky geometry/zbrush issues (which thankfully have been mostly resolved). At this point I'm thinking that fiber-mesh will be the best option for hair. I was examining Rockwell's illustrations, and while his characters tend to be slightly stylized or caricatured, the hair is fairly realistic. Sculpted hair would be much too stylized, and while there is the option of painting transparency maps on planes, it tends to lend itself to "neater" hairstyles, whereas my characters both have messier hair. An added benefit of using fiber-mesh is that since I will have to convert it to geometry in order to have it be compatible with all the render engines, it will allow me the opportunity to see how each one handles such high levels of geometry. While I am confident Arnold will have no issue with it, I am curious to see if Mental Ray can handle it without crashing.

Speaking of hair, obviously because she has none right now, the little girl does look a little odd. But in the few very rough tests I have done she looks much better with hair :-) The hardest part of sculpting these characters for me was trying to make sure their characteristics matched to either male or female. Even though boys and girls around this age do tend to have very similar features, they still needed to be distinguishable from each other. Their outfits are not taken directly from one Rockwell illustration, but rather pieced together from several, as I took some artistic license to envision what they would be wearing in my own interpretation of the "Tackled" piece I am using as my main inspiration.

As soon as I double check all my UVs for stretching, I get to pass these guys on to be rigged, and while that's happening I get to start texturing and shading. I'm hoping that part of the process will be much quicker, since I do feel I have a better idea in my mind of what the textures should look like (whereas with the modeling I wasn't initially sure what direction I was going with the characters' final look).