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An Animation Language for Renderman?

Posted by Cliff on from the directing-movement-in-your-scenes dept.

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."

2 of 24 comments (clear)

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  2. forget renderman... by soren.harward · · Score: 0, Troll

    ... and use Blender. I've tried switching to 3DSMax, Lightwave, Maya, and I just keep coming back to Blender. I can do all you want and more. A lot of people whine about the learning curve, but there are many tutorials on the web to get you started.