An Animation Language for Renderman?

cameloid asks: "I'm currently putting together a series of corporate movies, 6-12 minutes each, that each require quite a bit of computer generated animation. Like many others, I quickly found that 3D is the way to go and began using POV-Ray, mainly because it's free and uses a Scene Description Language (SDL) to describe scenes and animations. However, I also quickly found that raytracing can be a bit...slow for doing movie production. After a bit more research, I quickly discovered Renderman. At first glance Renderman can also be programmed from scratch, but doesn't have in-built support for animation. Each scene is complete description which cannot be parameterized using Renderman, alone. Does anyone know of a cross-platform, Renderman-compliant SDL implementation that can connect to any Renderman renderer and supply functionality similar to POV-Ray's SDL?"

"I've found that a couple of things are required: a rendering engine (I think that Aqsis covers everything I need in this regard); and a modeller (I'm currently evaluating K3D as a low cost option, although it has some important limitations at present). However, I've also been looking for something that does for Renderman what POV-Ray's SDL does for POV-Ray. I've found something called, surprisingly enough, 'Animation Language' which seems to do this, however it doesn't seem to be under continuing development. What's important is that the SDL supports general programming language features such as data structures, flow control, re-usable libraries (logos, 3D objects) etc, as well as something like POV-Ray's 'clock' variable for animation."

Comments

Renderman modelling

[Thornae]

Have you seen Ayam? It's a neat little Renderman modeller that ties into Aqsis or (the now defunct) BMRT.

Actually, if you're really wanting a good fast 3d animation workflow, I'd recommend Blender. The learning curve is steep, but once you're into it, you can work fast and smooth. There's lot of support around, and the documentation can get you up and animating within half an hour.

It's just that, a Renderer

[Quarters]

Renderman works on frames. It really doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, have any understanding of time or 3D space manipulations.

You need a modeling/animation package. Something that will let you build and animate your models and then output data from which Renderman or some other renderer can generate visible images.

Re:If you have 2k

[Pseudonym]

Don't waste money on MTOR. If you want Maya, get Liquid. Production-proven and open source. What more could you ask for?

*sigh*

[Pseudonym]

RenderMan is a language to get modellers talking to renderers, just like PostScript is a language to get typesetters talking to printers. You're not supposed to work in raw RenderMan any more than you're supposed to work in raw PostScript.

Having said that, probably the closest system to what you're looking for is Steve May's AL. If you can get it to work, it will probably do exactly what you want.

Remember, though, that RenderMan is primarily an API. The bytestream version came later. It was originally a C API, but there are now bindings for many languages including Java, Perl, Python and ML. Why don't you pick one and use that?

None of this should dissuade you from using a real animation system, though. If you have some money to spend, it's well worth it, particularly if you're planning to do this a lot.

Good luck.