Boutons Xara Stuff: Volume 4

[Gare]

Pixar Renderman is provisionally free. What the company is doing is trying to grow future professionals who understand the RenderMan pipeline.

But it's only the rendering engine, Boy. I've heard from reliable sources in the trade that Pixar animators use Maya and AutoDesk 3D Studio Max for making the creatures they then export and hand over to the styling and animation departments.

There's to me, a problem from the beginning. Registering this guy has a 1:10 signal to noise ratio. FINALLY, after I downloaded a copy, I was completely befuddled by the UI, commands, and a sense of orientation. I tried several programs before settling on Cinema 4D for modeling, and then Maxwell Render as a rendering engine for still frames.

BTW, many, many feature length animations don't use Renderman, such as all the "Despicable Me" series. A lot of animation house use off-the-shelf software, while others build rendering engines in-house.

Now, you can find a lot of models for free; just use "3D models FREE" as a key search in your browser.

Then consider Kerkythea to import the free files. It's not a bad engine, in fact, it's really good for non-ulttra-high-end work.




For the sake of fool disclosure (!) and that The Xara Group am our gracious hosts here, I must add that I use Xara Designer extensively for creating paths that I export to Cinema 4D and then perform an operation on them (extrude is an operation, among others). Truth is, no path creation utility within any of the modelers I've tinkered with have tools that can compare with XD's. Then again, I'vew had God knows how many years in Xara's workspace, so let's allow some prejudice here. :)

Just try to draw the base shape within 5 minutes with anything else than Xara! Okay, at left is an example of a Lathe; think of a potter's wheel. The Xara Shape is revolving around circle, and the result depends on how far the shape is from the hypothetical outermost edge of the Lathe. Then there's a Sweep operation. To get this shape, you run the shape along a path, in this instance a 45° arc. Where the 2D shape intersects the controlling 2D shape, there's a point of a surface. This is how solids are made.

Finally, at right, I did a Loft, which involved three of the same Xara shape, a small one in the middle with one on top and one on the bottom.





Shirt, I think I've just written a generic modeling chapter :)

SHORT ANSWER: Renderman is a professions rendering program, and as such is not mentally suitable for normal, well-adjusted adults. Besides, it's been quite a while since Renderman was the only and best game in town.

My Best,

Gary