Linked from Blender.org

Today I got a nice message from ZanQdo, aka Daniel Salazar from Blender.org.

Hi, just added a link to http://www.blendertorenderman.org/ in the rendering section of this page

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

I'm impressed with your blog, keep up the great work

cheers

So now when you click on the Renderman (RIB) link in the features of the Rendering section, it goes directly to here. This is a first! To be on the Blender.org site is another breath of accomplishment, even though I had nothing to do with the code itself. Nonetheless I think our voice has just gotten a lot stronger. We will see what happens.

HAIR!!

The developers of Aqsis and MOSAIC have recently been working very hard on correctly exporting Blender fur to Renderman and the results are paying off very well. One of the major issues with Blender and Renderman is that the particle system in Blender is difficult to work with and up until recently had been impossible. Since Blender's fur system is based on particle data there was only the ability to export a general description of the fur to the RIB file but no way to actually control the fur. This makes for some ugly fur, let alone hair.

Now there is a way to export Blender fur using guide hairs! A lot of it comes from a custom DSO that handles the generation of the hairs based on the guide splines, so it's not so much a part of MOSAIC but the script does make calls to it using fragments associated with a particular shader assigned in Blender. There is also work to allow the layered shader function of Aqsis (note: Aqsis is the ONLY RiSpec renderer capable of this, not even PRMan can do this!!), so this allows for even more interesting work.

One of the projects in the works is some talk about rendering the entire Big Buck Bunny short using Aqsis as the render engine with little modification to the scenes. However that is only a rumor and not set in stone. hehe.

To view the topic posts on the Aqsis site click HERE.

Blender to Renderman is now a domain!

Google is awesome, simply put.

This blog is now www.blendertorenderman.org!!!

This morning I was checking this out on Google, the ability to have the blog as an actual domain name, which honestly is easier to remember than the blogspot URL that has been in action for most of the year. Best part is that the blogspot URL will redirect to the .org address so there is no need to completely redo any posts or links made in the past. That is awesome!

Plus it cost only $10 a year!

Blender To Renderman has been upgraded, tell your friends and family!

Blender Renderman Artist Tools Downloadable ISO soon

This is a new approach to the spread of this project to the rest of the world. Tenzin and I have discussed the compilation of a downloadable ISO of the tools we use and are developing and call it BRAT - short for Blender Renderman Artist Tools. This was about 4 months ago, and after a brief moment of real life issues can continue to work on this. Soon there will be an ISO for Blender and Renderman.

The first will be an early release with tools, shaders, resources and such to test it's functionality and to test how easy to implement into an existing CG pipeline. All you need to do is just install the software and shaders and you are ready to go. So far it is almost ready for final release, just need to tie things up and give it a test run on fresh install of Windows before unleashed to the world and tested on Linux. There should not be any issues with Linux, the first pipeline using the current versions was being built on 64 Studio, a 64 bit Linux distro, and it worked just fine.

The next part of my project will create an installer of some sort that will setup the required programs, libraries and plugins to run pretty much out of the box without having to install and configure each and every one by hand. A pipeline setup tool for lack of a better term. That will be a bigger project that might not be seen until the end of the year.

More details will be outlined later, but expect this to be available for download early to mid September of this year (next month).