Light baking with RenderMan

This is another way to use RenderMan (Pixie) with Blender.

Check this blend file: Bakednpacked3.blend.zip 450 K

After opening press P-key to start game engine.



All light in this scene baked to textures.

Rendering done with a lot of passes.

First pass is photon map.

Second is indirect diffuse and direct light with raytraced shadows. In this pass I wrote point cloud map from Ci in surface shader in st space.

And finally I had added separate pass to each object to convert point cloud to texture.

This way to bake texture will be available as plug-in for Ribber3 exporter which we (Qewerty and I) intend to write.

Sler 0.2.1 (CVS) Shader Arguments Controlling

Hi!

One new important feature of development version of Sler is the possibility to control shader arguments generation. Now only marked inputs of nodes are translated into shader arguments in generated RSL code. Also you can set the storage class for arguments (uniform or varying) and mark argument as output. In future when creating custom channels for nodes is implemented you will be able to use really arbitrary output variables (AOV) but now you can use only existing channels.

This video demonstrates this feature:



Or you can download it here.

You can get latest development version of Sler with this command:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@ribkit.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ribkit co -P sler

Or you can use graphical tools (usually on Windows) like WinCVS or TortoiseCVS

Posting

Some notes on posting :

Please enter a title first, before writing any text and saving as draft or publishing. This is important. Without a title, the post is saved and named, for example, http://blendertorenderman.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html.

The name blog-post.html cannot be changed later, and this leads to duplicate links, less results in Google searches, and confusing data in Google Analytics pages, since entries do not have descriptive names.

Labels help navigate the blog and find posts on particular subjects, for example, clicking on the label shaders will open a page of all posts with that label. This is the equivalent of topics and threads on a PHP forum, and is very useful. It is possible this also increases the result in Google searches. The full list of labels is shown if you click Show All at the bottom right of the post entry form. I have used this and the previous post to add a collection of useful labels. I can add and edit labels manually if needed.

Images can be included in posts. These are best hosted elsewhere, if necessary mail them to me at :

blendertorenderman at gmail dot com

and I can upload them to Blender To RenderMan Site and mail you back the links with the embed code for a 600 x 450 preview, linking to a full size version on the site when clicked. The site is hosted on a very fast server and is better than Imageshack, Photobucket, Flickr and so on.

Videos can be embedded once uploaded to YouTube or Google Video. From personal experience, I prefer YouTube for final quality. Please do not use the option in the post entry page here to directly upload video to the blog. The embed code can be modified to fit the width of the post content area.

For example, the following embed code :

object width="425" height="350" ... type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"

Should be changed to :

object width="630" height="508" ... type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="630" height="508"

This allows for an aspect ratio of 1.333333333 (4:3) and a 32 pixel margin for the player controls, without any border errors.

When there are more videos of demonstrations, tutorials and rendered animations on individual YouTube accounts, I can create playlists in the Blender to RenderMan YouTube account, grouping them together in various ways, eg, a full set of tutorials for a particular BlenderMan exporter, another playlist for a collection of demos of all the exporters, collections of animations, and related off-topic content, for example, SGI and Pixar technology demos and shorts.

Finally, do not forget to use the Blender to RenderMan Group, and make announcements there for any posts here including a link to them. All topics should be announced on the group. The group is easier and faster to read than this blog, and also increases search engine coverage.

Note I have added a feed for the group and Comp Graphics Rendering RenderMan at the bottom of the sidebar. Other feeds might be added later, as can links to more related Blender and RenderMan sites and software.