has anyone used the RIB export feture on poser 5? If so can it be used to export animations to renderman? I whould love to use renderman for a animation I am working. Thank you for your time! Jason

What does RIB mean?

I've only done single frame RIB exports from Poser 4 so I can only suggest giving it a try with a small test. With BMRT, I think I had to replace the CR/LF in the RIB file to the Unix CR(?) format.

A word of warning about Renderman compliant renderers, unless you want an awful lot of study and enjoy highly technical command line apps, THEY ARE NOT FUN! Poseray for POVray is supposed to make the process easier, I've not tried it. In my experience the .rib file will need at least some hand editing. I gave up after some experiments because it's just not a process I enjoy. Until someone produces some decent GUIs for the various Renderman compliant apps I'm steering well clear. Incidently, Daz Studio will effectively be just that. It uses 3Delight (a renderman compliant renderer) and will obviously have a user friendly UI. Just export your Poser scene to it and render away. Of course who knows when we'll get our hands on it! :o( - Baz

Slight adjustments for Renderman compliant renderrers may be necessary, I often had to adjust texture paths when using BMRT or 3Delight. Yes, you can use it to export animations to Pixar's PRMan, it has been a feature since Poser 1. However, it has less relevance with Poser 5 now: FireFly is a REYES renderer like PRMan and has also a very flexible material system with almost similar features. If you don't want to use distributed rendering or write your own shader nodes in the Renderman shading language, there's hardly anything PRMan will do for you that FireFly couldn't (for much less money).

As I recall, you do have to adjust paths as Stewer said. It's just a matter of replacing the DOS style with the Unix style / directory markers if I remember correctly. While POVRay is not a Renderman application though it does have it's own text-based language and an associated learning curve if you want to take full advantage of its power. PoseRay is a ralatively simple entry point however. Using PoseRay, the basic process is: 1. Export scene as an obj file 2. Optionally, save scene as a pz3 file. 3. Open obj file in PoseRay. 4. Optionally, import lights, cameras and materials from pz3 file. 5. Make any desired setting adjustments. 6. Export to POVRay and render. In PoseRay, you can create or adjust lights using several light types, adjust/add cameras, tweak material settings, including downsizing texture maps, transparency and reflection, enable radiosity etc. There is also a facility for creating displacement maps using greyscale images which actually create a modified geometry. All in all, it is a very easy to use and capable program which provides a simple interface to the basic POVRay render settings Of course, if you want, you can employ all of the powerful features of POVRay within that application, which is where the learning curve comes in. I've only been using it for a short time but I've found that the imported Poser scenes usually require a couple of minor adjustments like setting the eyeball material transparency. Most materials seem to come in fine, even without loading them from the pz3. You'll probably want to experiment with the lighting, perhaps adding lights in PoseRay instead of some of the complex multi-light Poser setups. The basic process is simple though. POVRay is slow, especially with radiosity enabled and some of the shadow options. One of the main drawbacks of POVRay, BMRT etc. as Baz says is a lack of a modern user-friendly interface thoughn the builtin editor of POVRay does simplify the process a good bit. What no GUI will do for you is teach you the ins and outs of rendering, all the nitty gritty of lighting, radiosity, specular highlights, shaders etc. and how to use them to get the effect you want. I think people who have made the leap from Poser 4's relatively fire and forget renderer to Firefly have discovered that there's a lot to learn. The command line or text interface I can live with, writing my own frontend if necessary. Learning the other stuff is hard. For those (like me) too unmotivated to climb that hill, Poser 4 and a good light set is still a good deal and I doubt that most people usually tap its full potential. For my personal taste, the renders done with Cinema 4D are the most appealing, even compared to Lightwave and Max. I doubt that Cinema had a magic 'perfect render' button either though. This is a quick POVRay render from PoseRay which I am sure does an injustice to both applications but it was easy to whip out :-) Sorry, no Vicky but it was the only one I had sitting around.

thanks for the information! I whant use a renderfarm so this why I am going this route I will try it out as soo as I get my renderfarm put together!