For the first time, I am making my RenderMan module available as open source software. For those of you who don't know, RenderMan is a commercial rendering engine from Pixar that has been used in a number of films including Toy Story. The RMan module writes "rib" files that can be read by RenderMan. The freely-available Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT) will also read these files and produce even nicer but slower, true ray-traced images. This allows OpenDX users to create Hollywood-quality images with
o shadows (BMRT) o true reflections (BMRT) o anti-aliasing o texture and environment maps o shaders (light bulb, refractive glass, glowing filament etc.) o constructive solid geometry (union, intersection, difference) o true sphere, cone, torus etc. primatives o focus and motion blur (could be added easily) o fancy lighting: point source, cone, area lights, radiosity o and more So far, compiled only for SGI, but the code is simple and should compile elsewhere without trouble. You can get the code at the Cornell OpenDX repository: ftp.tc.cornell.edu pub/Data.Explorer/by_discipline/chemistry/RI.tar.gz Enjoy Richard Gillilan Cornell Theory Center
