Massive 6.0 Summary

Massive 6.0 Advanced Renderman

Deborah R. Fowler



MASSIVE Advanced Renderman

Updated on July 9  2014

click here for Motion Capture Resources

Using Textures in Renderman Renders

If you are using textures on your spiders you need to do the following:
Renderman requires textures to be in tex format. Instead of referring to the tif file, you must use a tex file. To do this you must use a shader in renderman, such as paintedplastic, that allows you to specify textures.

1. You can create the .tex file by using txmake. If you are in Windows you can go to a CMD window (from the startup menu) and select txmake filename.tif filename.tex when in that directory (cd to that directory). This produces the required .tex files. On linux just run the command in a terminal window.

2. In Massive, in the diffuse tab, where you have the texture filename.tif, double click on this and alt-c to copy the full pathname.

3. Go to the shaders tab now, and select paintedplastic - it brings up a dialog box. At the bottom you will see texturename. Paste the filename you have copied into that box but change the extension to .tex. In addition, there is now a tutorial by Dave Kin on how to use shaders/textures easily in Massive. Please see documentation in the dropbox folder or try the new renderman via Maya.


Other Topics and Open problems

If you want to use motion blur – simply click the button in the render options window and  turn up samples.  

Depth renders – to obtain the z depth information the preview render works fine, however the resulting file from the sim is not readable by other programs such as nuke. It is necessary to combine the render into an rgbaz  file. This can be achieved by running the following script X to add the appropriate lines in your rib render files. This file can then be imported into nuke and rendered.

(We tried rib include but couldn’t get the wild card to work, tried rib merge, tried txmake –work, byte and short as in txmake –float name.zfile name.tif )
 

Lights – you can import lights and cameras from maya (.ma), or use the ones in Massive.
 

Open questions for me: