The Pixar RenderMan Artist Tools for Maya from Alias/Wavefront are now available in the new version 4.5. The RenderMan Artist Tools consist of the modules Slim, the “artist-friendly” development system for shaders, MTOR, the RenderMan plug-in for Maya and Alfred, a script-controllable task processor that distributes and monitors render jobs in the network.
The RenderMan Artist Tools 4.5 for Maya are now available for three popular platforms: Linux, Windows NT/2000 and SGI IRIX. The new RenderMan Artist Tools represent another milestone in the integration of RenderMan into Maya. Even with highly complex operations, RenderMan can now be used even more intuitively and customised to the user’s specific needs.
MTOR now offers several trend-setting functions for editing even the most complex scenes and allows unlimited scalability. Automatic RIB archiving, conditional shader mapping and extended scripting capabilities are just some of the newly added features. Through the extended integration of MTOR into Maya, Maya’s Subdivision Surfaces and Particle Instancing are now directly supported, while the unique capabilities of RenderMan, such as detail fidelity, multi-segment motion blur, CSG operations, blobby modelling and much more, are directly available to Maya users.
For even more efficient shader development, Slim offers a new graphical user interface that greatly simplifies the creation of shader hierarchies. With the expanded function library, Slim offers even more creative control and an even more productive workflow than before. At the same time, the imaging tool “It” has been given a brand new user interface and a script-based compositing engine.
Alfred and Alfserver now have extended support for render scripts, multithreading for even more efficient workload distribution and command-orientated configuration. This version of Alfred, in conjunction with Alfserver, is capable of managing hundreds of render servers at once.
To make all the details of the RenderMan Artist Tools easier to find, the greatly expanded documentation of the RenderMan Toolkit and the RenderMan Artist Tools has been completely revised and provided with a fast full-text search function.
