Quote -
Me!  As a developer wanting to learn shader-writing, it would be brilliant to leverage what I've learnt into writing for a much large market, to include DS but also those "peripheral" 3D artists, who use those obscure programmes like Maya and 3DSMax and stuff like that.

Actually, all of this information is directly applicable to DAZ Studio Advanced (last time I looked). I was rather disappointed though, that you can't import / export complied shaders or code. That would really open the floodgates, so to speak.

Nowadays there's virtually no 3DSMax / Renderman translators so that might be a waste of time and mental ray would be a better choice of study - and that's a wholly different set of math.

Maya has a robust mental ray implementation as well but most "serious" Maya / Renderman artists either code with a text editor or use Renderman-centric tools.

Quote - BTW, did you ever wonder what why there's File / Export / RIB? Renderman Interface Bytestream? Oh the possibilities.

Oh, indeed! I can easily imagine moving in that direction in the near future, as Poser has come into a more serious market with Poser Pro... so who knows? Things may be developing in that direction even as we... er... type?

RIB export has been an option at least since Poser 3, possibly earlier. Any Poser 1 or 2 users can confirm this?

I never understood why is was included or what their "then" future plans were.