Poser Pro 2014 On Sale
Poser’s back on sale at 55% off. There’s that and then it seems Poser 10 has dropped in price significantly to just $69.99. Not sure when this happened, but if you can live with rendering with the 32-bit limitation, then it’s a good buy.
Poser Service Release 5.2
Along with the sale, Smith Micro has pushed out the “5.2 service release”, which includes a bunch of enhancements and fixes. I hadn’t updated since service release 2, so it was a nice surprise. Installed just today. As only an occasional user of the software I haven’t noticed much of a change, but there are likely others out there that are eager for their fixes and boosters.
Renderman Non-Comercial
The really big news comes from Pixar, who have just released a fully featured non-commercial release of their wildly famous Renderman. While this is super-cool news, it’s also somewhat muted by the fact that Maya and Katana are the only programs currently supported by Renderman directly via plugins. There are a number of other programs that have various levels of compatibility with RM. DAZ Studio with it’s tight integration with 3Delight (which is Renderman compliant), can export RIB files, which can be readily rendered with RM standalone. Poser, as far as I can tell is also RM compliant and can also export RIBs. So, great news, and ok news right there.
Commercial versions of the engine have had a huge price cut. Happy 25th birthday to Renderman!
Iray Tests
And just because, here’s a few tests I did recently with Iray. Happy days!
Iray by Jim-Zombie on DeviantArt
Interesting timing on the article, Jim. I’d signed up for RM’s non-com release awhile back, and quite literally the same day this came to public territory, FurryBall’s free version also slid across my field of view. I’d known about Studio’s RIB possibilities-my primary curiosity for signing up anyway-and wonder how difficult it would be to squeeze out a test scene from Studio to Renderman, or if it would even work.
Reading up on Renderman, it seems one has to have a fair amount of coding (or shader creation more correctly) talent to use Renderman as a standalone app. Paolo had talked about a plug-in fairly recently, though I’m sure Reality is keeping him Plenty busy!
A good read nonetheless =D
Exporting RIBs to Renderman should be similar to rendering with 3Delight’s standalone program. Obviously there are limitations in what we can send to RM without editing the code of our RIB files to optimise for and utilise some RM features. From what I’ve seen there are is a lot of code for RM shaders floating about, but I don’t see myself messing about with text files a great deal.