Learn How To Render Like Pixar

Unlock the secrets of Pixar's RenderMan with VFX artist Rusty Hazelden

- Rusty Hazelden

For over 30 years Pixar’s RenderMan has been used in the film industry to render movies featuring groundbreaking animation and visual effects.

In this four-part tutorial series, we’re going to discover how to harness the power of RenderMan by taking an animated shot from start to finish, and learn all of the techniques required to create a photorealistic animation using Pixar’s RenderMan for Maya.

Using RenderMan to create photorealistic renders has never been easier. In this series we’re going to begin with untextured objects in Maya, and learn how to create surface materials, set up lights, adjust camera attributes, customise the render settings, and batch render the final animation to disk using Local Queue as a series of EXR images. By the end of the project, you will have a solid understanding of the workflow used to light and render a dramatic night-time scene using RenderMan for Maya. Along the way, you will learn numerous tips and tricks that will come in handy on your next RenderMan project!

In part three of this tutorial series, we’re going to explore the powerful Alembic workflow in RenderMan and find out how to assign materials to Alembic archives using the Dynamic Rules Editor. Once we finish texturing the objects, we’re going to learn how to create a dramatic lighting setup that evokes the feeling of a work light outdoors at night.

01 OPEN THE MAYA SCENE

Let's continue from where we left off in the previous part. Go ahead and open your Maya scene from the end of part 2. Select the R_Nail object in the Outliner. Switch to the Rendering menu set, and from the Lighting/Shading menu, select Assign Existing Material>Nail_Material. This will apply the Nail_Material to the R_Nail object. The rest of the nails scattered throughout the scene are loaded from an Alembic file.

02 CHECK THE ALEMBIC SETTINGS