Teapots and Ribs. Yum!

This quarter I have been taking a Renderman class.  Well, it is technically PR Renderman (Photo Real Renderman), which is really just a production ready and incredibly powerful rendering tool.  It is used by a lot of large studios, and developed by (surprise) Pixar.

Right now, we are programming in scene description files, known as "ribs", which is like coding a scene by hand, geometry, lights and all.  It is actually rather challenging, but fun when you get used to it.  But it is slow, not fast at all, but knowing how the codes work is really useful.

Our latest assignment was to make a scene with a teapot, and some of the student's works were spectacular!  And yes, these were all HAND CODED (although we did get to use Cutter to help).  I decided to use this year's Renderman Walking Teapot toy I got from SIGGRAPH 2013 as reference, but the shapes were too complicated for me to figure out in the short time we had.  So I used it as inspiration, and made it my own.

The concept I had for this piece was to make it look like a toy tea set, since I used a toy as inspiration.  There is more I would like to do to this, but for right now, I am rather happy with what I have.  Feel free to leave feedback or comments!

Ubuntu

So this quarter my classes include 2 challenging ones, which will focus on writing shaders and materials with code, and my senior film.  It also includes one that focuses on Photoshop for photography, something I am already familiar with but it gives me the chance to make something with my skills that is all my own!  So you can expect to see a lot of pictures this quarter, but also work in progress toward my film.  It is going to be chronicled better on the official blog for the film, so I will probably include more of my other work here, such a the work I'm doing for Michelle Ionescu's senior film which I will be providing a link to the blog here as soon as it is up later this weekend.

So that leaves my materials class, which is going to be filled with a lot of code and scripting.  I'm actually learning Linux so I don't think I will show any of that stuff, but I will talk about it some.  It is actually kind of fun to navigate in Linux.  We are using Redhat at school, and most studios customize whatever Linux they are running, so it is best to be familia with more than one flavor.  To that end, I have spent the last few days preparing my computer and installing the latest version of Ubuntu on it, a more consumer level flavor of Linux.  I actually set it up to dual boot, but now I have to decide how far to take this.  What software should I put on which side?  How can I take advantage of Ubuntu the most?

Well for now I going to be getting a lot of practice with Linux, so don't be too eager to see any materials and shaders work just yet, it will come in due time.