I this tut I will show you a technique for reducing rendering times in MtoR/RenderMan.

1 - First we setup a scene. For this example i use a fairly simple one but we supose that is a huge city landscape.



2 - Let see what we got.

If you have it in your shelf, Hit the RenderMan Render button above you what I get with my setting.



This city took SOOO MUCH time to render 8-). We need to reduce rendering time in order to respect the deadline and the budget.



3 - So we start to think about the scene: What part of this city does not need to move or deform during the animation ?

The building of course. So why not to use the RIBBOX.

What is the RIBBOX ? It's simple Ribbox is some sort of Include, you pre-calculate the non-moving nor non-deforming object Rib file and you include them in a Rib file containing only the moving or changing elements. In my case the Camera.

Let see how does it work.

First in the RenderMan Globals set the parameters as shown below:





Setup the Renderer as a Custom Renderer and switch to the Custom panel and in the renderer text feild type notepad ( NT ) or jot-f ( SGI ).

Make sure the RIB format is ASCII.

You must specified the camera Shape name. without it you got a black image.

We don't need to change any other parameter..

4 - Now it't time to render



5 - The renderMan Globals parameters makes Alfred return only the rib file but no image.

The first file to be writen (in my case the first two) is the shadow rib file.

Click on Edit >Select all and Copy /Paste the content of this file in blank notepad or other text Editor page.

Save it and give it a simple and explicite name.



6 - Close the file rendered by alfred and an other one pops out. It's the Geometry RIB file.

Make the same operation like above (Copy/Paste etc...)

We now starting to edit these RIB :

In the shadow RIB file Search for the line Display and give your shadow a simple and explicite name.Mine are : Key_shd.tex and Orange_shd.tex

When it's done save your Shadow RIB file (I gave it the name city_shd.rib) and close it.