Hi, im writing my diploma and im searching for a sort of render engin dokumentation of p5 fire fly renderer. Does anyone know, where 2 find such a text? Im realy in a hurry here, so please ;] thanx da gRobi PS: tryed googeling it first, naturaly......

FireFly is a REYES/micropolygon renderer. If you search for REYES, micropolygon and/or RenderMan you should find a lot of information. There are also a couple of good books on RenderMan which should explain the principles behind these kind of renderer.

A good start would be getting this article from the ACM online library: Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, Edwin Catmull, "The Reyes Image Rendering Architecture", SIGGRAPH 1987

• There are also a couple of good books on RenderMan which should explain the principles behind these kind of renderer * Just to clarify that Renderman is not actually relevant as it is an interface definition/file format. Confusion is common as both REYES and Renderman were developed in unison by Pixar, and the basic functional requirements Renderman compatibility are, for this reason, very much biased toward the capabilities of Pixar's own in-house REYES implementaion PRMan. However, on the whole Renderman is intended to be(technological) implementation independent and there are Renderman compatible renderers the use non-REYES (e.g. RayTracing) techniques. Stefan is right though that the basic technology is based on the REYES (the engine was acquired from Pixels Digital). However, Firefly is a fairly poor example of the REYES principals, one of the cornerstones of which is ultra-low resourse usage. It was on this principal that much of the implemention was designed and choices were selected in the REYES spec. Low resource use can always be traded against image quality and performance, which has lead to REYES being the foundation of most modern rendering solutions, and the tool of choice for the vast majority of animated features. In implementing Firefly, despite its likely pedigree, CL have unfortunately managed to breach this principal by attaching it to an extremely resource hungry front-end. The result is a typical programming bottleneck, or if you like, something like harnessing a pedigree racehorse to a plow. Poser just cannot serve resources efficiently enough to allow the full potential of the rendering technology to be seen. Bill