renderman tuts

[castaneda]

does anybody know if there is going to be any future definitive tutorials on using renderman in 3d coat? The one by adam Gibson was good but not thourough enough, at least not for me.  Im kind of surprised that 3d coat hasn't put more of a focus or promotion on using renderman in 3d coat. currently I use Vue as my renderer but would like to render all models and scenes within 3d coat to a 2d image.

[AbnRanger]

On 9/15/2018 at 1:46 PM, castaneda said:

does anybody know if there is going to be any future definitive tutorials on using renderman in 3d coat? The one by adam Gibson was good but not thourough enough, at least not for me.  Im kind of surprised that 3d coat hasn't put more of a focus or promotion on using renderman in 3d coat. currently I use Vue as my renderer but would like to render all models and scenes within 3d coat to a 2d image.

It's implementation in 3DCoat leaves a lot to be desired. I asked the developer of that feature, multiple times about some limitations, but never got any response. I think Andrew may have assigned him something else before it was ever full implemented. Here are the current limitations from what I've seen

1) Will only render one UV surface, so if you have a model with multiple UV maps, it won't render but one of them

2) No Shadow Catching material/shader (must have for rendering with an environment map as the background...model looks like it's floating, otherwise)

3) No Interactive Mode, which is the biggest limitation of all. Too slow, when in 2018 every render has an interactive rendering mode.

4) Turntable rendering doesn't work with Renderman integration. It does with the default render, but not Renderman.

5) It's best used for Surface mode objects (because the 1 UV map limitation makes it almost unusable for many paint objects), but even then, it doesn't seem able to handle much of a poly count. 20-30mill seems to be it's max, even with 64GB of RAM, and even then it's prone to crashing the app or hanging.

For these reasons, the Renderman integration seems half-baked, currently, and only usable on Surface mode objects, where you have already set up the materials the way you like in the Viewport (which does give a very close proximation), and if you are rendering a still. Outside of that, it's kind of like a feature that was given up on halfway through. Sort of like some of the Beta Retopo tools Raul was working on a few years ago. Andrew plans to revisit the Retopo room sometime before V5, to add new tools that do what those beta tools did and beyond.

I think the Developer of the Renderman integration may be working on a GPU brush engine for V5. If that works out well, hopefully he will come back and address these limitations in the Renderman integration.

 

[stusutcliffe]

Oh good , I'm glad someone smarter than me cant get along with the Renderman thingy, I gave it a good go but didnt get any decent results. And thanks for pointing out the multiple UV thing, I wondered why some bits didnt have any colour on them.

I dont really look under the hood to see how things work. For me things either work or they dont work, if they dont work, I move on. ( I do give things a good shot though and dont dismiss things straight away).

Im quite happy using Marmoset now. Simple and cheap. I did flirt with Daz Studio Iray as a renderer ,which I found really impressive but a bit fiddly.

If the techies at 3dcoat could just add bounced light/colours and refraction to the 3dcoat renderer  I would be happy using that. ( techies...would that be a really hard thing to do? )

( oh yeah  and better control of the lights.....hee hee)