🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec14.041302.472@stone.com> bbum@stone.com writes:
>In article <1992Dec13.063538.9696@athena.mit.edu> shanega@athena.mit.edu  
>(Shane G. Artis) writes:
>> While there's a little attention focused on prman and qrman I'll insert
>> my favorite question into the discussion:
>> 
>> How on earth do you create shadows with prman???
>
>You can create your zfile with a call along the lines of:
>   RiDisplay("filename.z", "zfile", RI_Z, RI_NULL)
>
>However, I have not yet decided on the best suffix to use, as .z is already  
>in use.  I use .zfile instead of .z.
>
>Using the depth mapped file, once you have it, is still no joy!
>
>wick

I got several answers to this one (where do these people find
documentation?) so I thought I'd follow up.  The technique described
above works fine and I'm much happier.  I then thought that it would
be nice to add a shape to 3DReality (I'm not affiliated) that included
a shadow light source shader.  Things got a lot tougher here though.
The API doesn't allow a bundled object to render the whole scene to
get a z-buffer image that can be passed as an argument to the
lightsource shader (at least I couldn't get it to work, which is a
different thing).  It looks like shadow sources need to be a
higher-level object in 3DReality (or maybe any RenderMan front end
with an API?).  So, I'll direct my comments to Stone Design and the
other front-end designers.  Is there any plan to include automatic
shadow generating sources in later releases?  This is a major addition
to photorealism.

Regards,

Shane