Having never played with RIB files, but knowing that Poser can export them (to what degree I don't know) I was wondering if any Maya or MAX users know if this could be a better file transfer method than Pz3? ====3Delight Web Page Q&A=== 2) Can I use 3Delight to render Maya and 3DS scenes? Maya has its own, very basic, RIB exporter. Although directly usable by 3Delight, RIBs exported by Maya lack many features such as shaders and shadows. Alternately, MayaMan is a rendering plugin from animal logic for Maya that can be used to export RIB files with everything required to produce high quality images with 3Delight (including shaders). For 3DS, animal logic offers a similar product called MaxMan.

Attached Link: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/geomformats/rib/

RIB is intended as input for RenderMan renderers and contains only information relevant to rendering - no joint parameters, no keyframes, no morphs etc. Poser's RIB export allows you to render Poser scenes directly in 3Delight, PRMan, BMRT or Aqsis (without the help of D|S) but it's fairly useless as an exchange format between applications. Stefan

Thanks Stefan- Great Info link too! But still wondering- at least theoretically- if DS COULD IMPORT RIB files, would they look like "finished and textured" 3D models (even if static only)?

Only partially. RIB files are not limited to polygons (like D|S) but can also contain NURBS, solids and procedural surfaces.

Why do this when you can get all the data (mesh, mats, joint params, morphs, animation, etc) from the pz3 file?

O.k.- how about this- If you have seen the new "DAZ" file, it is very small, and appears to contain a fraction of what a Pz3 would contain- so obviously then this is a "pointer" file? Why would DAZ chose to impliment this method if Pz3, or their own native version of a Pz3, would be better? Pz3 is just a text file, right? Why then not a DAZ file that does the same basic line by line description?

In the user man it says they're planning some sort of protection scheme for content, so this probably why they chose a binary format. The files it points to are also binary (look at the content folder under Studio Alpha (dso, dsv, etc).

Yes, that is interesting- sort of like Lightwave LWO and LWS files. I would guess then a program like Maya must be EVEN MORE like the DS file system? Would this also probably mean that as binary files the DS files would be readable on UNIX systems using Renderman (or using 3delight renderer, at least)?

3DS, C4D, LWO, DOC, DAZ, etc. etc. etc. ...are all just binary files that contain information pertinant (sp) to the parent application. I don't see any real reason to look for something intrinsic in the fact that they are binary to get excited about ;). As for whether application X on OS Y could or couldn't read binary format Z, it depends on whether the app has code in it to read that particular file format. In general, PC (Intel) and Unix binary is 'incompatible' by nature. The order of the bits/bytes must be re-arranged for the data to make sense between these systems. So there has to be code in place to do the swapping. Renderman won't be able to read DS files on ANY platform - unless the Renderman developers add code to read the DS file format(s). And, at the same time, Renderman CAN read the DS file formats on ANY platform, IF they add the proper code (on each platform) to read them. Then again, Window's Solitaire program could read the DS files if it had the code in it to read them... so I guess I'm not quite sure what the question really is, but I hope that helps answer it.