Beginning in Renderman

I signed up to news on non-commercial Renderman before the I started my course in September and just before Easter it was finally released.

I got my license and got set up to use it in Maya, after doing a few tests and figuring out the basics in using it I rendered some shots from the most recent piece of work I've done.

The first 3 images were just rendered normally with a simple lighting setup, the final 2 I rendered using Mayas internal depth of field.

One thing I could not figure out was soft shadows, I know it is achievable but I haven't found a good enough guide to walk through it yet.

 I like the caustics on the floor for this image, where you can see some of the orange colour bouncing off of the cube and onto the floor, it was simpler to achieve this in Renderman than Mental ray.


 This image is to noisy, especially on the face of the character. It could have done with a lot more samples to remove the noise, I'm probably least happy with this image.


 This one again has some issues, there is no cube to produce the orange bounce light, but there is some weird shadowing around the edge of the character which I'm not sure how to fix.
 This one again has some issues around the arm and head, but you can see the DOF effect on the hand in the foreground.
I like this image a lot, I think the framing is quite nice, but here you can see the material on the cube. This is a Renderman plastic material which looks pretty nice. I like the small reflections on the corner, its subtle but it does add to the look.

Overall I think Renderman is easier to set up on than Mental ray. It has a lot more settings, but things look better right off the bat. It isn't practical for sequences, for me, due to the much longer render times per frame.

 I'll be posting the sequence that these images are from in a day or two, I've rendered the sequence in Mental ray with a very different lighting setup. This was simply a test of Renderman.

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