🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi, I'm running a photorealistic RenderMan implementation on the NeXT,
and I'm trying to determine to what extent I can perform true
ray-tracing with this program.  PRman generally uses shadow maps and
environment maps to calculate reflections and shadows, but I prefer
the greater accuracy possible using ray-tracing and radiosity methods.
These are implicitly supported using the renderman shading language
function, illuminance(), but I'm not clear how to write a surface
shader that will successfully allow me to trace reflections among
surfaces as well as from light sources (which I already can handle
fine.)  Has anyone out there addressed this issue before?  Does anyone
know if the NeXT version of PRman supports the illuminance()
construct?  Does anyone have a full release specification for PRman on
the NeXT platform?  NeXT provides no documentation except for that
based on the Quick RenderMan specification, quite a different beast.

In a similar vein, has anyone been able to succesfully pass arguments
to the NeXT-provided (or hand-written) surface shaders?  Whenever I do
I get error mesages parsing the .RIB file (which I pass by hand to the
PRman renderer).  So far the shaders only use their default values
even though I'm using a program that finds and prints out the various
allowed arguments (thanks to Daryll Strauss for the code!).

Help here would be very very much appreciated.  NeXT doesn't provide
any real support for this sort of low-level stuff.  All that I know
has been gleaned from The RenderMan Companion (by Steve Upstill).
Note that I have ordered the RenderMan 3.1 Specifications from Pixar,
so anyone who says 'buy the manuals' shouldn't (unless there are other
manuals...)

Thanks!

Shane