Today in this blog; dear readers we will talk about Pixar’s new RIS RenderMan.
RIS stands for RenderMan Interface Specification.
Pixar is popular and famous animation studio located at California.
Pixar is known for CGI animated feature films created with RenderMan.
Pixar RenderMan is a 3D rendering software which can produce photorealistic images.
Pixar uses RenderMan to render high quality images and it is available as a commercial product in the market.
One can also download free non-commercial version of RenderMan.
With its high quality technology Pixar has delivered wonderful movies like Toy Story, Incredibles, Finding Nemo and the list goes on.
New Photorealistic Rendering Mode
Pixar’s RenderMan RIS is a new rendering mode which is fast and easy to deliver quality photorealistic images.
This has been released at SIGGRAPH 2014 in the month of August in Vancouver.
New RIS RenderMan has ray-tracing feature along with traditional features.
Ray-tracing generates an image by tracing the path of light as pixels on the image plane.
It offers progressive refinement; great photorealism and the faster computation are the goal of ray-tracing.
RIS RenderMan has been launched into 19th version of the software.
This is compatible with 64-bit operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux.
RIS provides highly effective methods for creating the transport of light through multiple state of the art algorithms.
It also includes advanced Unidirectional Path Tracer and Bidirectional Path Tracer with photo mapping.
This picture shows volume rendering using Unidirectional Path Tracer, PxrPathTracer.
The indirect illumination rays in this picture originate from an interaction with the Cornell box and not the volume.
RIS RenderMan supports performance enhancements, artist friendly workflows, developed re-rendering and advantages of RenderMan’s REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw) architecture.
RIS RenderMan has become advanced, versatile and flexible rendering system by offering two rendering modes within one unified environment.
Rendering technology has constantly evolved during the past years and with new RIS RenderMan Pixar can deliver additional rendering methods.
For rendering imagery RIS performs better and produces a cleaner better render.
According to David Hirst, global head of lighting at MPC (Motion Picture Company) new RIS RenderMan brings the future of fully photo-realistic ray-traced rendering process to RenderMan.
He further said that the team has tested this RIS RenderMan on their latest movie and they are completely impressed by the speed and rendering process.
As a VFX tool RenderMan is widely used in motion pictures and televisions.
Reduced cost of RenderMan made it more cost effective to expand capacity and generate high quality pixels.
Pixar made available free non-commercial RenderMan without any functional limitations or time restrictions.
Non-commercial RenderMan is available freely to students, institutions, developers, researchers and for personal use.
The current version of RenderMan cost $495 per license for commercial use.
How RIS RenderMan Works Renderer
In RIS RenderMan; renderer is responsible for sampling pixels and constructing images.
Pixels and sub-pixels create the sample files.
The renderer is capable of generating multiple images at the same time to highlight various geometric features.
Camera
Once the image is placed on the 2D positions, the camera projection turns it into 3D rays in camera space.
RIS mode provides full support for camera simulation like motion blur, depth of field.
RIS supports perspective and orthographic projections.
With ray-traced new projections has become possible.
Projections like sphere, cylinder and torus can be used to render maps and panoramic images.
Integrators
Integrators takes up the camera rays from the projection and gives back shaded results to the renderer.
Integrators handle the light transport.
Geometry
In RIS mode each traced ray is checked for intersection against the geometry in the scene.
RIS mode supports full range of geometric primitive volumes, patches, curves, points, quadrics and subdivision surfaces.
Object Instancing helps to reduce memory by permitting cheap clones of complex objects.
One can add detail to any surface using displacement or blurred away.
It also supports complex motion blur.
Subdivisions can easily produce smooth, curved surfaces compared to polygons.
Materials
In RIS each piece of geometry has single attached Bxdf or shader that determines gross material type by finding in which directions it most strongly reflects lights.
It has production-ready layering model material and special material for skin, glass, hair.
Patterns
In RIS mode; material shaders controls the gross appearance of an object while pattern controls the detail by altering the frameworks of the shaders across a surface.
Patterns connect with shaders and to each other to build up complex shading networks.
Lighting
Lighting in RIS is done via geometric area light system.
RenderMan’s geometric area light system enables emission volumes.
Every illumination in the above scene is provided by the volume there is no their light source in the scene.
Lighting in RIS also supports wide range of sophisticated lighting shaping effects.
RIS Is For Shiny Objects
RIS RenderMan is fulfilling the rapidly evolving demands of visual effects.
To generate beautiful, shiny car shots RIS is ideal whereas for complex hair or furry animated creatures REYES is suitable.
RIS RenderMan is good for modeling.
REYES is also a rendering software used to be in old RenderMan version.
Pixar’s animated team favored RIS during the making of Wall-E and favored or utilized REYES to make Ratatouille.
RIS is suitable for shiny projects; its ray tracing-path tracing feature is developed for that.
RIS allows overnight render with maximum per frame.
The choice of renderers gets influenced by many things like render farm budgets, required memory size etc.
This new RIS is very fast, stable and simple to use.
RIS has speed up the look development process remarkably.
For Eugene Riecansky Creative Director at Rockstar award winning studio this new version is a game changer and he is thrilled to use it.
Pixar has done wonderful performance with RIS for RenderMan version.
One can set a character in a shot fully knowing that the nature of the shaders won’t change with lighting.
New RIS RenderMan is 10x faster than the old version in various situations.
Pixar’s RIS RenderMan is a great help for the VFX artists; it makes their work much easy.
For further knowledge about RenderMan ask our professionals at MAAC Kolkata.
