Comments for treyharrell.com

Comment on th_domeAFL Mac compile by Trey

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:12:05 +0000

Hrm. I’m a bit busy at work for the next couple weeks, but I can look into it for you when I get a spare moment.

It it telling you specifically which shader library that it’s missing? It’s testing just fine against my 10.6 / Maya 2010 build here, but that doesn’t really mean much (dev tools, available mr .so’s that it’s compiled against).

–T

Comment on th_domeAFL Mac compile by Mark Stewart

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:54:16 +0000

Heya, I’m a mac newbie- I get a mayatomr.custom “can’t find shader library” error when I try to render with either of these. they’re installed in the appropriate folders in the .app and show up in the MR shader manager. I’m sure I’m just missing a step or somesuch. I’m on Maya 2009 on 10.5.8

Thanks!

Comment on Optimizing Multiple Huge Maya/Mental Ray Displacements by Trey

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:58:37 +0000

Another tip for those of you with Nuke… just shufflecopy 3 maps into a write node. Faster, you can save a gizmo that does it, and you don’t have that nagging paranoia that Photoshop’s color management might be mucking with your precise float maps during copy & paste!

–T

Comment on Optimizing Multiple Huge Maya/Mental Ray Displacements by Richard

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:57:43 +0000

Really simple but clever and efficient workflow. I will definitely be using this approach in the future

Thanks,

Rich

Comment on It might be love… by Amit

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:20:46 +0000

HI Trey,

Read your post.. yes it does make sense now and is very informative. Thanks for talking time to explain and clearing things out.

Have a great day,
ak

Comment on It might be love… by Trey

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:48:54 +0000

When I talk about PRMan, I mean Pixar’s renderer, PhotoRealistic Renderman in general. It could be either Renderman for Maya, Renderman Studio, or even Renderman ProServer. In this case, it all applies to workflows in both Renderman for Maya (RFM) and Renderman Studio (RMS).

You can think of RFM as simplified version of RMS, although RMS has a lot more tools available and is a lot more flexible.

The cat image was actually created originally with RFM. It also renders as expected in RMS either with the internal RFM Pro engine or externally via ProServer.

The reason I use “PRMan” instead of generic “Renderman” in conversation is that “Renderman” can also refer to 3Delight and other compliant/compatible rendering engines — it’s actually the term for the renderer specification, so “PRMan” is actually meant to avoid confusion and speak generally about any of Pixar’s tools.

Here’s a quick rundown on additional features in RMS:

http://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/rms.html

But basically when I use “PRMan” I’m talking about techniques that work with pretty much any Pixar Renderman product. If a technique was product-specific (like shader creation in Slim), I’d be specific that I was talking about RMS.

Make sense?

(Yeah, it’s a little confusing at first!)

–T

Comment on It might be love… by Amit

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:57:54 +0000

You are talking about PRMan… please correct me if I am wrong…PRMan is different from Renderman for Maya right ?? So basically 2 products from Pixar and RfM is a stripped and simplified version of PRMan ?

Thanks again,
ak

Comment on It might be love… by Trey

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:33:17 +0000

I’ve found that when working with PRMan, the UV samples on fur feedback do in fact affect the placement, fullness and smoothness of fur on the model. This isn’t the case with MR, and it’s a bit counterintuitive as the usual workflow is to turn feedback up while grooming and then turn it back down for interactivity.

–T

Comment on It might be love… by Amit

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:25:34 +0000

Hey thanks a lot for the tips. I finally got a smooth and soft looking fur by basically adjusting the following settings

Pixel Samples: 6×6
Sigma Hiding: on

One more quick question though… Does U, V samples on the fur feedback shape node also affect the final fur look in renders ?
or is it just to preview fur in the viewport ?

Thanks & Have a great Day,
ak

Comment on It might be love… by Trey

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:27:44 +0000

Amit,

For that cat model, my starting point was about 150,000 hairs per fur description at a global scale of 4 and a 2k map size. My “fuzz” description has a lot more and my “fill” layer has a lot less. I’ve also got a very sparse mutant fluff layer for longer hairs that’s set very low.

Here’s a snapshot of the UVs… basically I laid them all out so that all the hair would lay down in a singe direction using polar+curl, then I blended the seams by hand with artisan.

http://www.treyharrell.com/downloads/catuv.jpg

–T