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There are several Python scripts floating around on the web that will export a blender scene to several formats for other renderers, like Renderman (tested with BMRT), POV-Ray, and others. Hopefully now that the source is opened, people will start making the interface smoother, like a menu where you can choose the renderer. It shoudn't be too hard. And the interface is nice.

Especially if we're talking about POVRay. I mean come on, what trash. Now of course, if it was produced with BMRT...

The RenderMan Interface Standard is a very intriguing standard, attempting to be the "PostScript of 3D". It is succeeding.

Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan is the RenderMan compliant renderer that is most used in movies, because it is very fast, but at the cost of several cool things. PRMan can't do true reflections, refractions, or even transparency, because it can't compute global visibility.

Ray tracers on the other hand, such as BMRT (which is fully compliant with the RI spec, and includes many extensions to the interface, which PRMan does not support) is a freeware RI raytracer. This is much slower than PRMan, because with raytracing you have to maintain all geometry in the scene in memory at all times, because you don't know where a ray will bounce until you fire the ray. (Because PRMan doesn't do reflections, it doesn't need to keep all the geometry in memory, and can discard anything not *directly* visible to the camera)

PRMan can however, fake lots of things that can give a nearly realistic effect, saving tons of time. Reflection maps, environment maps, and ambient light all simulate the true effects of things like reflections, and radiosity that all of us see when we take our eyes off of our monitors. BMRT does all of this without any faking.

Both PRMan and BMRT use the RI shading language to programatically define surfaces and volumes. Smoke in a room is a volume (or atmosphere) for example and can only accurately be controlled using a shader. The shading language of the RenderMan Interface is UNPARALLELLED in the industry and can produce some of the most realistic looking surfaces/volumes you'll ever see.

Both renderers read .rib files, which are exactly what were used in rendering this movie. Beware though, to get the polygon counts that they have, you'll need about 1-2 gigs of disk space available for EACH FRAME, and about 1-2 gigs of free memory available to render them. Also, there is a C binding of the RenderMan Interface in which you can write a program that defines the placement of objects in a scene, and pipe the output of this program straight into the renderer. Instructions for this are available with BMRT, as is an example. All the tools to do any of this also come with BMRT, free of charge.

Radiosity is something that PRMan cannot do. Check this stuff out: Radiosity images. These were not done with BMRT but easily could be. These were test renders for Arnold, a global illumination renderer. BMRT does global illumination and could easily (but slowly) produce images just like these. PRMan cannot do this, it simply takes too long.

So satisfy your curiosity about modern day rendering and read up on this. It is very interesting stuff.

You are wrong. The shader language can raytrace.

Using BMRT together with PRMan, it can ray trace, and many people use it. Like in Hollow Man, for instance.

Here is a gallery, which includes Hollow Man. The call looks like this :

color trace (point from, vector dir)

Traces a ray from position from in the direction of vector dir. The return value is the incoming light from that direction.

Source

POV-Ray is a freeware opensource ray tracer. It is very well supported in the community as there are many different patches that inhance POV-Ray in itself. Not only is this program open source and freeware, it's on every damn operating system I can think of (Very short list hehe) But you'll find it for Windows, Linux, Macs, Amiga, DOS, etc.

There are several others such as, sPatch (kind if dead, but if you can find it you'll love it. It's a modeller that lets you export to POV-Ray or export DXF files.)

Another fun little program which I haven't had the time to play with is Blue Moon Rendering Tools. Read this for more info on BMRT.

Finally there is Radiance. I haven't had time to mess with this program, but it can make stunningly realistic images through the programs usage of realistic lighting. This is only for UNIX users at the moment. There is no known port (that I know about) that is in the works.

Well that's just a list of some 3d goodies. I've wanted to toy around with 3ds Max for a while. Sure I could have warezed it off, but I've given up on that. Now I can play around with a free stripped down version of 3dsmax. Yippie skippy or something.

-PovRayMan

POV-Ray is a freeware opensource ray tracer. It is very well supported in the community as there are many different patches that inhance POV-Ray in itself. Not only is this program open source and freeware, it's on every damn operating system I can think of (Very short list hehe) But you'll find it for Windows, Linux, Macs, Amiga, DOS, etc.

There are several others such as, sPatch (kind if dead, but if you can find it you'll love it. It's a modeller that lets you export to POV-Ray or export DXF files.)

Another fun little program which I haven't had the time to play with is Blue Moon Rendering Tools. Read this for more info on BMRT.

Finally there is Radiance. I haven't had time to mess with this program, but it can make stunningly realistic images through the programs usage of realistic lighting. This is only for UNIX users at the moment. There is no known port (that I know about) that is in the works.

Well that's just a list of some 3d goodies. I've wanted to toy around with 3ds Max for a while. Sure I could have warezed it off, but I've given up on that. Now I can play around with a free stripped down version of 3dsmax. Yippie skippy or something.

-PovRayMan

Small point of contention -- POVRay is mainly a renderer. Blender is a full 3D Animation application. In the graphics world, that's comparing apples with, well, apple-pie, perhaps. Folks interested in POVRay should also check-out Blue Moon Rendering Toolkit, an excellent free (well, okay, shareware, but free for non-commercial use) renderer that does radiosity.

Even cooler is the appearence of Larry Gritz in the credits. Larry wrote Blue Moon Rendering Tools, a freely distributable RenderMan compatible ray-tracer. Learn more about it here. Linux, SGI, Alpha and Windows binaries available here.

Phil Befreys, to my knowledge the only other person to make a commercial-quality RenderMan compatible renderer (Digital Arts DGS), is now working at Pixar as well.

Even cooler is the appearence of Larry Gritz in the credits. Larry wrote Blue Moon Rendering Tools, a freely distributable RenderMan compatible ray-tracer. Learn more about it here. Linux, SGI, Alpha and Windows binaries available here.

Phil Befreys, to my knowledge the only other person to make a commercial-quality RenderMan compatible renderer (Digital Arts DGS), is now working at Pixar as well.

Check out Blue Moon Rendering Tools .

(Hope I did that right.)

It's a shareware RenderMan-like renderer that runs under Linux (among others). Not a total 3D solution, but uses Linux power where it is most needed, on the rendering side.