🚀 go-pugleaf

Help!

I've been soundly defeated in my effort to do surface mapping in the
3DKit.  The Renderman Companion (TRC) says this is done by using a
surface shader. But the shaders in /NextLibrary/Shaders which look
like candidates, ie "texmap.slo", I can't get them to work.

In general, I can successfully tell an N3DShader to read a .slo file,  
set its instance variables, and then associate that shader with an  
N3DShape.  For many shaders, this works perfectly.

The "texmap.slo" shader has a "texturemap" i-var, which (I guess) is  
supposed to be set to a texture file.  However, setting this i-var  
never seems to 
/NextLibrary/Textures..

TRC (p 253) lists a fragment for doing what I want (mapping an 
image file onto a surface) but it makes use of an imaginary shader 
called "mytexture".  It says that such shaders 
are easy to write, but  does not say how.  

Basically, I'm wondering:

1) How do I map a texture file onto a surface using the 3DKit?

2) If there's no standard shader for doing this, how could I write
one?

3) How can I create a texture file from, say, a TIFF file?  (I know
about RiMakeTexture(), but the documentation is vague about file 
formats.)

Thanks in advance,

Chris Lydgate
chris@insight.com