renderman hair (warning: lots of tiny renders)

[jujube]

This is more of a test than a WIP of anything in particular. This could have gone in Off Topic, but this also sorta falls under technical screenshots, and I figured people would be interested. I recently installed Renderman for Blender (and on Maya but this post is blender), and the hair shader is lovely. The hair geometry basically all has the default settings, with the pixar hair shader applied. There's a special hair color node that plugs into the diffuse color.

I think I uploaded too many pics, but they're pretty and I like to look at them...

[RobBaer]

Way to go ... You got me off on one more learning adventure, and I already would have described myself as a "jack of all trade; master of none" as the saying goes. Kinda fun though ...

[jujube]

Thanks. I'll post a full tutorial when I understand it myself better. (still ironing out the bugs...) But to anyone reading this, I highly recommend trying out renderman, as it also comes with a (3-layered) skin shader out of the box.

[jujube]

I'm collecting and learning stuff for tutorials. A quick tip: When you activate renderman, there's a button that converts cycles materials to renderman materials. Here is what the default cycles shaders get converted to. Note the difference between the cycles glass/refraction and the renderman version... the renderman version appears to add a white fresnel to the glass shader. This seems to be related to the issue someone was having with dark edges on eyeballs.

[jujube]

This is my first tutorial. Here I'm keeping it brief, and mostly listing the links you need to get started. In my next post(s), I'll write about how to render a makehuman character in renderman, written for the perspective of someone who already understands Cycles.

Basically: Renderman is a ray tracing renderer developed by Pixar and was (relatively) recently made available in Blender. Some benefits to trying it out:
1) Comes with a physically based uber shader
2) Seems to be more efficient than cycles for complex scenes/lighting

Follow the instructions here to install renderman on your computer. This installs the renderer itself, not the addon that allows it to interface with blender.
https://renderman.pixar.com/view/get-renderman

The caveats are that you need to make a renderman forum account in order to register renderman, and that it's free, but only gives you a non-commercial license.
Their FAQ page has more details on the terms of the non-commercial license: https://renderman.pixar.com/view/dp25849

After running the renderman installation exe, you should be able to install the blender plugin the same way you would any other addon (by using the install from zip feature).
https://github.com/bsavery/RenderManForBlender/releases

The renderman site also has instructions on getting started in blender (no login required to see this page, but you do need to log in to see the forums)
https://community.renderman.pixar.com/a ... ender.html

After installing and enabling the renderman (aka PRMan) addon, renderman should be in the drop down list of available renderers along with blender internal and cycles.


Things to note when addon is enabled:
There's a renderman sidebar on the left pop up tab of the 3d view window. You can initialize the material library browser in there... for me it works, and I can look at the pretty thumbnails, but it gives me an error if I try to apply or save a material (the preset browser works in maya however).

Note that you can still select the cycles nodes when PRMan is the active renderer, but blender will crash if you hook up a cycles shader to the PRman output. But even when the active renderer is set to cycles, as long as your PRMan addon is enabled, you can still see and select the PRMan nodes anyway (Blender will probably crash horribly if you try to use them in cycles), and when you click the gray dot in the cycles material editor (in the properties window), it will add a PRMan texture node. You have to go to the node editor and manually hook up a cycles image texture node, or just disable the PRMan addon while using cycles. (unless there are glitches I don't know about.)