Day 8

I would say the day started off pretty well. In the first session I started off with renderMan. I am going through Ian Stephenson's book Essential RenderMan. Yesterday I had read through the first 10 chapters of the book today I consolidated that with making a few notes out of them and coding a few basic .rib files. Nothing visually interesting right now, just a lot a randomly drawn spheres. Have to start somewhere and these are like the Hello World!  for renderMan. Also, however simple it is giving me an insight into the renderMan rendering system.

I started off with the basic scene where I learned to move stuff around, understanding how renderMan works like a state machine (the hierarchical transform state). This scene has two spheres which have been translated 1 unit to the left and 1 unit to the right.

In this next file I learn about grouping transforms and the rotate command. The exercise for this is to make a very simple head as shown in the output below.

This is the final bit of learning grouped transforms. The head made in the last file is translated as a whole and placed on top of a body (of course its a sphere :) I like spheres!)

Towards the end of the session today I started looking at colours and opacity as handled by renderMan. This is handled without the shaders right now. Later on I will look into it in detail, when I go into shaders.

Colour Output

Opacity is also very interesting as it is a bit confusing, being so close to colour. Understanding the difference is crucial for the future purposes. The difference lies in the that the colour is what we get when the light is shone from the front and opacity is calculated from the light shone from the back. I can't go into the detail right now as what I would write would be from Ian's book and thus his copyright. Here is the output for opacity:

I also worked with shading rate but the output wasn't very convincing. Ran out of time(and patience) allocated to renderMan for today. Might look into it tomorrow. Tomorrow I will also look into cameras in renderMan, playing with the basic clipping and FOV attributes. Then I will look into the renderMan lights and then into the inbuilt renderMan materials. 

Thats it for now. Might be doing some more work in the late evening session. Right now starting off with my car deformation bit for the innovations.