blenderblog

As part of the 'Blender Conference Follow-ups' posted on Blender3d.org, one point should be of great interest to all Blender users - Aqsis; external RenderMan rendering support.

Aqsis is;

a high quality, photorealistic, 3D rendering solution. It complies with the Renderman® interface standard defined by Pixar.

Aqsis comprises a command line rendering tool, a tool for compiling shaders in the RSL language, a tool for preparing textures for optimal use, and various developer libraries to enable integration with third party tools.

Aqsis is licensed under the GPL license, with some parts under the LGPL.

A few things to note about Aqsis;

• The Aqsis project has been around for quite a while and is a quality renderer when used correctly [1 - 2 - 3 - 4].
• Aqsis is Renderman® compliant and therefore compatible with a lot of the high-end commercial 3D apps.
• Aqsis is licensed under the LGPL so, in effect, it's free as in speech.

Having some sort of 'output to Renderman' feature will be a big plus for Blender users trying to start 3D production companies as it would help then to interface with companies using commercial 3D products.

To move forward on the Aqsis/Renderman intergration the following points were set down at the Blender Conference;

1. Cleanup and recode of the current Yafray exporting in convertBlenderScene.c. It can then become a generic exporting API for RenderMan as well.
2. Aqsis is dynamic loadable, like Yafray, so a plugin connection can be added which returns the rendered image to Blender, and updates rendered parts in the Blender render output window.
3. Most complex; how to make a decent UI integration. RenderMan is a shading language, and for exporting Blender Materials/Light it would require to fully mimic the current rendering code in Blender. Although this can be done for a couple of standard Material/Lamp presets, it would be better to just support a menu in the Material Buttons which allows linking to a shader script. Tests could be done with linking to the built-in Text files and Text Editor. Also the to-be coded generic Property System could help here.

This will be an exciting aspect of Blender's development to keep track of.

If you're keen to get into a little 2.40 action, an Alpha version Blender has been released to the public.

The targets for the upcoming 2.40 release are frozen now, but not all projects have been completed yet. That's the reason we decided to start providing "official" alpha testing builds. This not only to have a first preview of all exciting new development, but especially for testing purposes and to serve as a reference for reporting bugs in our Tracker.

Full Blender3d.org News Post.

Blender 2.40 Alpha Downloads

Blender 2.40 Alpha Release Notes.