RenderMan

RenderMan: Optimization is Everything

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

RenderMan (PRMan) can be a very fast and efficient renderer as long as you spend some time optimizing the asset you are developing. Here are a few useful pointers.

Always pre-bake diffuse occlusion and subsurface scattering into pointclouds/brickmaps whenever possible.
Always pre-filter your textures to RenderMan’s native format.
Always use a higher local shading rate for objects that [...]

MEL: Setting the value of a Slim attribute

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Setting the value of a Slim attribute, from MEL, requires a bit more overhead compared to the normal Maya attribute. The following example shows how it can be done.

string $palette = `slimcmd slim FindPalette “MYPALETTE”`;

string $all = `slimcmd $palette GetAppearances`;

string $shaders[];

tokenize( $all, " ", $shaders );

 

for ( $s in $shaders ) {

    string $attr [...]