🚀 go-pugleaf

|> Given that renderman is in 3.0 just how slow will an NSC perform with
|> it.  I just really want to knowwether something can be done, albeit
|> slowly, rather than absolutely not being a viable option on a NSC.  I
|> don't mind waiting for results.

It is pretty amazing, and as they say "It just works"

Let me start being saying that I am doing most of the RenderMan work on
a Cube. Performance for interactive RenderMan is quite reasonable. It
will skip complicated operations when it starts to fall behind. For
instance, if I am rotating around a complicated object, it might just
show me the start and the stop point of my rotation. Interactive
RenderMan can be controlled, via some of its primitives, to improve or
lessen the quality of the rendering, which has a inversely corresponding
effect on the speed.

Photorealistic RenderMan is a different story. It basically acts like a
printer. You can configure your NeXT (or better yet, all the NeXTs on
your network) to act as renderers. Then you just send your file to the
machine and wait for the output. The speed of the rendering depends
heavily on the quality of your image, the complexity of your scene, and
the complexity of your shaders. As a rough benchmark, I can generate an
image of the teapot with one light with most shaders in a 72x72 (1 inch
x 1 inch) window in 10-20 seconds.

The point is that you use interactive RenderMan to do your on screen, or
rough draft work, and then let photorealistic renderman crank on the
final version of the hours in may take.

-- 
Daryll Strauss          			     f	The Aerospace Corp.
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"It's my reality and I'll warp it if I want to!"     d	(213) 336-9358