Advanced Usage of RSL in RfM Pro |
These features are supported by the RenderMan for Maya Pro plugin in RenderMan Studio and are not available with the regular RenderMan for Maya plugin.
RenderMan for Maya has always offered support for using the RenderMan Shading Language, to a certain degree. Hand-written, compiled shaders can be imported as a RenderMan Shader node in Maya. RenderMan for Maya Pro introduces a new way to access the awesome power of RSL: RSLFunctionNodes.
RSLFunctionNodes appear to the enduser as plugin Maya nodes that can be "wired" into standard Maya shading networks for use with RfM. They are radically simpler to create than a standard Maya plugin node because RfM handles all the details associated with registering and populating Maya nodes with attributes. RSLFunctionNodes are described in a manner patterned after Slim Templates. There is an association between each RSLFunctIonNode type and RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) functions. End-users can trivially extend the collection of RSLFunctionNodes and even override those provided by Pixar.
Pixar Animation Studios
|