Blender to RenderMan Forum

In autumn last year the Blender to RenderMan forum created by Ted Gocek, that was at http://www.bestfreeforums.com/forums/blendertorender.html, was deleted by the host for no reason.

Neither he nor I have a copy of the SQL database, or the facilities to set up our own PHP forum server, or maintain one, so we discussed spreading a new forum across a Google Group, Blogger account, and Googlepages site.

These are now at :

• Blender to RenderMan Group


• Blender to RenderMan Blog


• Blender to RenderMan Site


• Blender to RenderMan Channel
  

Announcements, discussions, questions and answers can be posted to the group.

In addition, once developers of Blender to RenderMan export tools join the group, they will be invited to join the blog.

Announcements about exporters and other tools can be posted on the group, with a link to a more detailed post on the blog, which will also be able to include images, as well as better options for syntax highlighting of code.

When there are more videos of demonstrations, tutorials and rendered animations on individual YouTube accounts, I can create playlists on the Blender to RenderMan Channel, 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.

X-Ray shader

Disney Pixar, 1024x768, 540 KB.

Morphine X-Ray, 1024x768, 1.2 MB.

Some years ago, Simon Bunker created the simplest, fascinating RenderMan shader, an X-Ray effect shader.

I have seen hardly any work using it, and I find it useful for molecular and medical imaging, as well as for more creative effects.

Both the above images were created with POVMan, in Mac OS.

An animation of the molecular structure of Morphine, exported from Swiss PDB Viewer to Mac MegaPOV, manually modified in POVMan to use Pixar Renderman Shading Language, and encoded in Apple Quicktime, at 1 frame per degree, through a total of 360 degrees, at 640 x 480 pixels, can be downloaded from :

Morphine X-Ray 640x480 28 MB.

Right click on the video icon and save as MorphineXRay64048028.mov.

Alternatively, lower resolution versions can be seen on either Youtube or Google Video :

Morphine X-Ray Youtube
Morphine X-Ray Google

Simon Bunker's web site, RenderMania. POVMan web site, POVMan examples.

Yohimbine Fur

I wanted to see how Zeger Knaepen's fur shader looked on a molecule.
In his notes, he said the fur shader does not work for animation. I like it anyway.

Also, I could not resist using POVMan's ability to layer textures.
Specular highlights, as would normally only be seen on smooth shiny surfaces,
were added to the finish section, using POV's Scene Description Language.




A frame still, as will be rendered without specularity, 1024x768, 839 KB.

Created in POVMan on Mac OS Classic, rendered direct to Quicktime.
POVMan is a version of MegaPOV, that uses Renderman Shading Language.

I intended a rotation of 360 degrees, one frame each, this failed on f 147.
For smooth animation of the fur, I want to use 30 frames per degree :
10,800 frames, at 25 minutes render time per frame, 4,500 hours.

Don't expect to see the finished version before next year.

ShaderMan.Next source code released

Interesting news :

"Hello,

I've released the source code for ShaderMan.Next into a public domain at

http://code.google.com/p/shaderman.

New version is completely portable between Windows, Linux and Mac,
written in Python (less then 2000 lines of pretty straightforward code)
and extensible from the very beginning - current code drop allows to
create Renderman shaders, Unix pipelines and Python Image Library
(PIL) source code.

With best regards,

Alexei Puzikov
http://dream.com.ua
http://renderman.ru
http://code.google.com/p/shaderman "

to which Randolf Schultz replies :

"finally. :) Now I can begin to think about an integration into Ayam.
What about a "sink"-node that connects over sockets to an Ayam material?

best regards,
Randolf,
--
http://www.ayam3d.org/ Ayam, where export means NURBS. "

from

C.G.R.R ShaderMan.Next source code released

Animation Language : Bouncesphere

Technical details on Eurochemistry site Bouncesphere

Screenshots, and brief descriptions of the software used,
AL Bouncesphere II

The scene, animation and shader data, syntax highlighted,

AL Bouncesphere III

The original higher quality 640x480 video can be downloaded here
bouncesphere.avi

AVI, iPod and Sony PSP versions can be download from Google Video

HTML embed code is available from Google Video or Youtube

Steve May's AL page at ACCAD Ohio State University,
AL Animation Language

Chrysler Building

Chrysler

Alternative renders :

Chrysler wire

Chrysler 1

Chrysler 2

Chrysler 3

Apple 5th Avenue Google Earth

From the signature buildings collection at Google Sketchup 3d Warehouse.

MS Linux II

I have for over a decade been in two minds about Novell.

Ever since they bought Digital Research, and for a while continued to provide one of my favorites among command line OS's, DRDOS/GEM. Then they let one of their employees start his own company, Caldera, and take DR/DRDOS with him. Then Caldera started making it's own Linux distribution. Then Caldera sold DR and DRDOS to another company. Last time I looked, DRDOS was an expensive specialist embedded solution with different versions for Lawyers, Doctors and so on.

Caldera meanwhile merged with the Santa Cruz Organisation, a respected commercial Unix company better known as SCO, who had previously bought Unix from Novell, who had bought it from AT&T. Caldera changed it's name to SCO, and continued to make and sell SCO Unix, and Caldera Linux. Around 2002 - 2003, SCO decided that every Linux distribution on the planet had stolen code from Unix, and that was it's copyright, and started lawsuits against Linux vendors. The entire sequence of events known as The SCO Case is discussed on Groklaw. During this time Novell bought Ximian, and became increasingly involved in development of Linux software, including the Evolution Email suite, and the GNOME Desktop.

I've been observing the appearance of a certain executive in various companies over the last 12 years or so. I won't name him, but he's been involved in several companies, joining them at board level just before the time major corporate changes and decisions have been made in those companies. Those changes sometimes have been disastrous for those companies, often in a way that is highly beneficial to a much larger OS and software company. I suspect this person could possibly be a corporate "assassin", that makes sure certain innovative companies don't survive.

I'm not mentioning the companies either ... if the people this person works for are as dangerous as I suspect, it would be unwise. I have a strong survival instinct and have had enough trouble in my life working in dangerous environments and among even more dangerous people. I am in no mood for any threats or other trouble from some corporation.

Shortly after the SCO vs Linux situation, Novell bought SuSE, then offer SuSE users indemnity from SCO's lawsuits. Since Novell acquired SuSE, parts of SuSE and GNOME Desktop have become increasingly dependant on Mono, an Open Source implementation of C Sharp/.NET, a Microsoft patented Object Oriented C based programming language. Also, since Novell bought SuSE, I notice an increasing number of SuSE's original personnel leaving. When I began using SuSE in it's early days, it was a very good thorough product from a German company, some of their core developers being scientists, hence the tradition of a 3d plot of a complex mathematical function being the graphic for the manual cover and distribution box. I appreciated the fact that the OS was under German management, and provided a reasonably good selection of scientific software.

In the last few years, SuSE has grown in popularity. It has always been the Linux of choice for several governments. Also it became the Linux used by IBM, Sun and when SGI moved on from the MIPS processor to 64 bit Intel, SuSE replaced Irix as SGI's OS. However, there needs to be a lot of work before SuSE is the ultimate Linux, let alone OS, for 3d computer graphics, or real time visualisation. One example would be the need to fix it's implementation of GTKGLExt, which does not work well enough to be able to build important 3d modelling applications on SuSE. Another example is SuSE's implementation of Boost, and in particular annoyance to me, libboost.python. The only reason my continual attempts to build Python's CGKit 2 on SuSE kept failing is because the library dynamic linker could not find SuSE's libboost.python even though it was installed and provided with an explicit path to it. Others have had this problem too.

SGI's OS being unable to build important 3d modelling applications and computer graphics toolkits is to me beyond embarrassing. SGI are a very professional company with over twenty years experience in computer graphics, and they have designed and built the finest 3d visualisation and rendering systems in the world for two decades. Further more, I have built code designed for SGI MIPS Workstation systems in the 1990's, on SuSE Linux on my IBM ThinkPad laptop. Their code is so well written and commented, it's a pleasure to read, let alone see it compile and work perfectly. SGI's developers know what they are doing.

By the way, if anyone from SGI reads this and wants to fix this problem, contact me ... I'm bored with things not working, need money, and a Personal Iris-Iris File-Data Station 4d/35, a dual head Octane2 workstation and an Altix 3200 cluster would be much appreciated :)

Now Novell and Microsoft partner, the outcome being that Microsoft are to provide SuSE Linux, these two companies to improve interoperability between their products and a mutual patent protection and indemnity agreement.

Let's leave the legal nightmare this could become to those who have already discussed it, my first few paragraphs above will give you a good idea of where this all could lead.

If this goes ahead, SuSE could be the only Linux officially supported in Virtual PC, the Intel x86 emulator that Microsoft bought from Connectix, and in my experience, the best emulator and as good a product as can be. Microsoft will not tell you this, but Virtual PC can run BeOS, NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP and Rhapsody, enabling old OS's with no support for modern devices like Wifi cards or PCMCIA HDD's to work fine via the Virtual PC's interface to the system's real hardware. Support for SuSE in Virtual PC could include the ability to drag drop between the Windows and Linux desktops, and support for Linux filesystems such as Ext2, Ext3, and ReiserFS. OK, I admit, I've used Ext3 in Windows 2000, but no direct support for it as a VPC Extension between guest and host OS.

Conversely, Novell/SuSE's implementation of WINE, the Windows compatibility runtime for Unix that enables a user to run Windows programs in Unix or Linux, could with support of Microsoft, begin to work a lot better. The support in Linux for running Windows applications needs improvement, and Microsoft approved or supplied DLL's et cetera could be a possible development of this partnership.

Don't expect either Virtual PC support for Linux, or a Microsoft improved version of WINE or CodeWeaver's Crossover Office, to be free.

Now that Apple supply an Intel computer and OS, will Microsoft supply SuSE for PPC ? :)

Finally, here are links to other people's opinions of the Novell Microsoft deal :

A five year deal with Microsoft to dump Novell/SUSE Nicholas Petreley, Linux Journal

More Details on Microsoft SuSE partnership Penguin Pete's Blog

FUD motivated Microsoft SuSE deal analyst Munir Kotadia, ZDNet Australia

Microsoft and Novell: Bambi meets Godzilla? Joyce Becknell, The Register

Microsoft to Novell:Respect Chris Williams, The Register

Moglen: How we'll kill the Microsoft Novell deal Andrew Orlowski, The Register

Microsoft bankrolls Novell to tune of $348m Gavin Clarke, The Register

Microsoft loves SUSE Linux (true!) Gavin Clarke, The Register

Microsoft makes claim on Linux code OUT-LAW.COM, The Register

MS and Novell: the end of a good feud David Norfolk, RegisterDeveloper

Unix compatibility

Why are so many websites dysfunctional on Unix ?

Get this straight, right now, and don't ever forget it ...

The World Wide Web was invented by a scientist, Tim Berners Lee, on NeXTSTEP, a Unix Operating System, on the NeXT Cube, at CERN laboratories in Switzerland. Microsoft didn't contribute a damn single atom to it.

The first web browser was written by the NCSA, on Unix, it's called Mosaic and myself and others still have it on some of our older computers.

The servers and routers the internet depends on also run Unix, except a small faction trying to run servers on Windows. This is not unlike trying to cross an ocean in a disposable paper cup.

I've been writing HTML for almost as long as Tim Berners Lee himself. My code worked on every platform that can connect to the web, including working on cellphones from the beginning.

3 to 6 years later after scientists had done all the hard work, Microsoft jump on the bandwagon and behave as if they invented Operating Systems, User Interfaces, Computers and the Web ... they didn't. Suddenly the Web is flooded with badly written code, and badly designed and completely ugly websites, all from Windows users.

So why do countless websites hardly work at all in Unix, why can't people write code that runs properly, following the cross platform standards the Web is designed to run ?

How difficult can it be to learn Unix now, enough to run it and test HTML on it ?

It used to cost thousands of pounds but for the last 10 years it has been free in the form of FreeBSD or Linux, and SuSE linux is a professional enough Operating System to be the one used by Novell, Silicon Graphics, Sun and IBM, and now Microsoft.

These days installing Unix is as easy as booting from a CD and following the instructions, exactly as installing Windows.

The first Operating System to be distributed on CD was NeXTSTEP, the first Operating System to boot and run from a CD was BeOS.

Learning to write correct cross platform HTML, DHTML, CSS and Javascript in it is as simple as going to the W3Schools website of the organisation responsible for web standards and following the online tutorials and documentation there, which is all free.

If a person can't do that, what the hell are they doing designing web pages, and setting up webservers in the first place ? Doing it the Microsoft way is costing them money, for a limited result. Why waste so much effort on something inefficient ?

MS Linux

SuSE to be distributed by Microsoft ... OK, I'll be back after I've made and taken about a kilo of valium.