Renderman

[Silverwings]

This is a detail shot of a gourd shader that I wrote in RenderMan. It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, this was one that was designed from inception to be purely code based. Completely procedural. In other words, I didn't paint any of this in Photoshop. This was generated completely by text that I coded for RenderMan, and rendered with the Blue Moon renderer.

That makes it the texture equivalent of a vector graphic; I could zoom in on this in Maya, and render it out and get very high quality at any zoom level. It's a fascinating way to work, and while it's not always practical, it's good to know the option is there. It's processor intensive, so it's really only viable in preproduction (or frame by frame rendering like Pixar's work) as opposed to a real-time engine like a game console.

[Silverwings]

Here's a concept piece that a friend of mine did when he taught the RMan class. He challenging us to recreate the snake's coloring, again, entirely in code. The second shot, on black, is my attempt.

[Silverwings]

Here's an early version of an eye that I coded in RMan. This was a prototype for the Lemmings short film. Below are a few differently colored eyes using the final shader.

The Maya object mesh was a pure sphere. All illusion of dimension (the "sunken" iris and transparent cornea) come from tweaking the normals in code.



And the final shader:

[Silverwings]