AndyShade? RenderDude??

With all the outstanding rendering programs out there, why would I possibly want waste my time writing another?

A valid question.

It basically goes like this: I have been playing with ray-tracers for several years and fully understood the technology. I recently started trying Renderman (specfically, Pixar's prman), and I was impressed. The procedural shading was powerful and elegant. In fact, for months I couldn't quite figure out how they did displacement shading.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, it hit me. I suddenly realized what they were doing. This evening I tested my theory by writing a very simple program to implement the algorithm. As you can see from the images below, it worked.

At this time, my little program only supports ambient and directional lighting (just enough to see what's going on!). In the following images, I rendered the same cylinder 3 times: once with flat shading, once with an opacity surface shader, and once with a displacement shader. For a program which took me less than 2 hours from start to finish, it does pretty well doesn't it?

I haven't decided what I'll do with this knowledge. I am aware that Pixar no longer supports prman for Mac and DOS systems -- neither does BMRT. Perhaps that leaves me a little room in the market?

Last Modified: November 25, 1997