RenderMan: Optimization is Everything

nikos — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:56:52 +0000

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 don’t require much detail.
Always use trace sets when dealing with raytracing.
Always check the displacement bounding box.
Always cache your shadow or deep shadow maps to disk.
Always check the XML stats to identify which parts of the objects are taking the longest time to render.

MEL: Setting the value of a Slim attribute

nikos — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:06:35 +0000

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 = `slimcmd $s GetProperties -name "MYPROPERTY"`;
if ( $attr != "") {
slimcmd $attr SetValue "MYVALUE";
}
}

NikosGatos.com | Blog » RenderMan

RenderMan: Optimization is Everything

MEL: Setting the value of a Slim attribute