An Animation Language for Renderman?

cameloid asks: "I'm currently putting together a series of corporate movies, 6-12 minutes each, that each require quite a bit of computer generated animation. Like many others, I quickly found that 3D is the way to go and began using POV-Ray, mainly because it's free and uses a Scene Description Language (SDL) to describe scenes and animations. However, I also quickly found that raytracing can be a bit...slow for doing movie production. After a bit more research, I quickly discovered Renderman. At first glance Renderman can also be programmed from scratch, but doesn't have in-built support for animation. Each scene is complete description which cannot be parameterized using Renderman, alone. Does anyone know of a cross-platform, Renderman-compliant SDL implementation that can connect to any Renderman renderer and supply functionality similar to POV-Ray's SDL?"

"I've found that a couple of things are required: a rendering engine (I think that Aqsis covers everything I need in this regard); and a modeller (I'm currently evaluating K3D as a low cost option, although it has some important limitations at present). However, I've also been looking for something that does for Renderman what POV-Ray's SDL does for POV-Ray. I've found something called, surprisingly enough, 'Animation Language' which seems to do this, however it doesn't seem to be under continuing development. What's important is that the SDL supports general programming language features such as data structures, flow control, re-usable libraries (logos, 3D objects) etc, as well as something like POV-Ray's 'clock' variable for animation."

Why not renderman?

[Naikrovek]

sure the functionality isn't there to have ONE scene file and create multiple frames (not that I know of anyway) but is having multiple scene files REALLY that bad?

I've used renderman and I've used pov-ray and renderman is where i spend all of my time now. Its just so much better, unless you really need ray tracing, and prman 11 includes raytracing and global illumination, so even then the only reason to use pov-ray is a financial one.

ask yourself if a single scene file is really more important than the speed an quality of your rendered images...

Re:Why not renderman?

[cybermace5]

Multiple scene files won't do much to speed up rendering. POV-Ray IS raytracing, the rendering of each scene is going to be very high quality but must take a while.

A single scene file just means that a few things change position, shape, or angle depending on an external time variable. This does not affect the speed of rendering in the least. Maybe .01 seconds of processing time per frame. Every scene, regardless of whether it came from the same file or not, has to set up all the objects and initialize rend

Re:Why not renderman?

[Naikrovek]

yes i know this.

prman is faster because it is NOT a ray tracer, and that was my point, not that multiple scene files would speed things up. Ray tracing is very very slow in relation to scanline rendering, and scanline rendering is what prman does.

[ i should note here for the record that RenderMan is a 3D language standard, and PRMan is Pixar's implementation of a renderer based on this standard. When I say RenderMan however, I'm speaking of the software, not the language standard. ]

Re:Why not renderman?

[bromba]

Yes, when doing animation, having 1 scene file per each frame is exactly THAT BAD. Actually, it's disasterours if you think what happens if you have to make even a small alteration in one frame - then you have modify all scene files for the following frames. And if the guy is rendering 50 frames/sec then, well...

The best way to use RenderMan seems to me what another poster did with PovRAY: perl scripts generating frame files from a single master scene file.

Re:Why not renderman?

[EnglishTim]

Actually, the capability *is* there. You can produce a Renderman file that will produce multiple frames quite easily:

RiFrameBegin(0) ...
RiFrameEnd()
RiFrameBegin(1)
RiFrameEnd()

If the meshes you're using are not morphing at all, just moving you don't need to write out the new mesh data every frame, just use a RiFrameArchive to define the frame once and then reference it from then on.

I'm not sure what kind of thing you're creating here, but the fact that you're not using something like Maya, MAX or XSI t

One Solution...

[phraktyl]

I've been using POV-Ray for longer than the animation capibilities have been included in the scene file, and I got around it by using a script (Perl, shell, etc.) to create and render each scene files, or to have a main scene file which includes a file with the changed values, and have the script create that file and render the scene each time.

You are still working with a single scene file, but everything is changed and automated by way of the script.

Re:One Solution...

[Neon Spiral Injector]

That's exactly what I was thinking. I too have been using POV-Ray since version 0.5. I got a taste of animation from Polyray, but I still prefered the output of POV-Ray (actually at the time, I found Vivid to produce the best looking images, but I had too much time invested in learning POV to pick up another scene language, not to mention a right-handed coordinate system). Anyway, to make a long story short, I ended up writing QBasic programs that would write out .pov files, and a .bat file that would ca

Renderman modelling

[Thornae]

Have you seen Ayam [ayam3d.org]? It's a neat little Renderman modeller that ties into Aqsis or (the now defunct) BMRT.

Actually, if you're really wanting a good fast 3d animation workflow, I'd recommend Blender [blender.org]. The learning curve is steep, but once you're into it, you can work fast and smooth. There's lot of support [elysiun.com] around, and the documentation [blender.org] can get you up and animating within half an hour.

Re:Renderman modelling

[cameloid]

yep, I've had a look at Ayam, it looks fine for illustrations, but again doesn't support animation.

Re:Renderman modelling

[Thornae]

...but again doesn't support animation.
Mm. As noted below, not a lot does wrt renderman, at least, not without paying lotsa dosh. I presume you've had a look thru' the RMR links page [renderman.org] - there's a couple of possibilities there, but mostly alpha. The other thing to do would be to get in touch with the people who created this [sourceforge.net] and this [sourceforge.net] rather impressive animation and ask how they did it. You'll probably have to email the aqsis site maintainers to get their contact details.

Also, I forgot to link the brand new R [rendermanacademy.com]

It's just that, a Renderer

[Quarters]

Renderman works on frames. It really doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, have any understanding of time or 3D space manipulations.

You need a modeling/animation package. Something that will let you build and animate your models and then output data from which Renderman or some other renderer can generate visible images.

If you have 2k

[tolldog]

If you have the money, I would look at getting Maya.

There are plugins to output to renderman (mtor) and it also has its own renderer. If you want to do procedural animation, you can do it all in mel.

-Tim

Re:If you have 2k

[Pseudonym]

Don't waste money on MTOR. If you want Maya, get Liquid [sourceforge.net]. Production-proven and open source. What more could you ask for?

*sigh*

[Pseudonym]

RenderMan is a language to get modellers talking to renderers, just like PostScript is a language to get typesetters talking to printers. You're not supposed to work in raw RenderMan any more than you're supposed to work in raw PostScript.

Having said that, probably the closest system to what you're looking for is Steve May's AL [ohio-state.edu]. If you can get it to work, it will probably do exactly what you want.

Remember, though, that RenderMan is primarily an API. The bytestream version came later. It was originally a C API, but there are now bindings for many languages including Java, Perl, Python and ML. Why don't you pick one and use that?

None of this should dissuade you from using a real animation system, though. If you have some money to spend, it's well worth it, particularly if you're planning to do this a lot.

Good luck.

Re:*sigh*

[cameloid]

yep, I've already read up on the RenderMan spec etc, and quickly dropped any notions of writing RIB by hand...

I did mention AL (Animation Language) in the original posting, but I'm not keen on using something that may quickly go out of date. At least with POV-Ray, it's being actively developed. However, something like AL is exactly what I'm after. Basically, a POV-like SDL that compiles down to a RIB file that can then be sent to a RenderMan compliant renderer. As you say, much like PostScript. I'll check

Hash animation master

[f00zbll]

if you haven't checked out hash animation master, you should take a look. It has all the equivalent features of Maya and SoftImage. The renderer is pretty good and the animation features are nice. http://www.hash.com/

Why spend the money on Renderman ??

[aibrahim]

You might be farf better off spending your money on a license for Lightwave or Maya.

I use and prefer Lightwave, it also has a far better renderer than Maya included. In fact the renderer is the feature film league, and is routinely used on highly visible productions.

Both of these products are available for Windows and OS X.

Also, you can find a very large selcetion of models, textures tutorials and experienced help for these packages if you need them.

If you are going to be doing this regularly then I ha

RIB vs Language binding

[PostPhil]

Most people will use a separate 3D package to output RIB, and therefore never deal with Renderman directly. However, the Renderman specification allows for language bindings, such as the official bindings for C, that you would use to have greater control over the scene. I personally am a Python user, and prefer to use the CGKit [sourceforge.net] language bindings.