Deborah R. Fowler
MASSIVE Advanced Renderman
Updated on July 9 2014
click here for Motion Capture Resources
Using Textures in Renderman Renders
If you are using textures on your spiders you need to do the
following:
Renderman requires textures to be in tex format. Instead
of referring to the tif file, you must use a tex file. To do this
you must use a shader in renderman, such as paintedplastic, that
allows you to specify textures.
1. You can create the .tex file by using txmake. If you
are in Windows you can go to a CMD window (from the startup menu)
and select txmake filename.tif filename.tex when in that directory
(cd to that directory). This produces the required .tex files. On
linux just run the command in a terminal window.
2. In Massive, in the diffuse tab, where you have the texture
filename.tif, double click on this and alt-c to copy the full
pathname.
3. Go to the shaders tab now, and select paintedplastic - it
brings up a dialog box. At the bottom you will see texturename.
Paste the filename you have copied into that box but change the
extension to .tex. In addition, there is now a tutorial by Dave
Kin on how to use shaders/textures easily in Massive. Please see
documentation in the dropbox folder or try the new renderman via
Maya.
Other Topics and Open problems
If you want to use motion blur – simply click the button in the render options window and turn up samples. Depth renders – to obtain the z depth information the preview render works fine, however the resulting file from the sim is not readable by other programs such as nuke. It is necessary to combine the render into an rgbaz file. This can be achieved by running the following script X to add the appropriate lines in your rib render files. This file can then be imported into nuke and rendered. (We tried rib include but couldn’t get the wild card to work, tried rib merge, tried txmake –work, byte and short as in txmake –float name.zfile name.tif )Lights – you can import lights and cameras from maya (.ma), or use the ones in Massive.
Open questions for me:
- swimming textures
- shadow color
- shadow intensity
- occlusion