A COMPLETE SHADER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

• Increase productivity with Slim’s shader tools. 
• Create original RenderMan® shaders interactively.
• Customize Slim with your own RSL code and scripts.

Slim - The advanced shader authoring system

 
Manage and Create Shaders
 
Slim™ is a powerful shader management tool developed to meet the demands of sophisticated productions. Through scripting, Slim’s support for Maya®
attributes, and its general extensibility, Slim provides automated and customized solutions for shading workflow. Slim also functions as a shader generator, allowing RenderMan shaders to be generated interactively, without programming. With Slim it is possible to generate a wide range of the highest quality procedural shaders. Slim, as a combined shader generation and management system, plays a key role in RenderMan Studio™.

Create high quality procedural shaders — without programming.

Stages of a procedural water shader

Direct Connection to Maya®
 
From Slim, you can import RenderMan shaders directly into Maya® scenes. Create a new shader, and then immediately import it into Maya where you are able to attach it like any other Maya material. Open multiple palettes, external and internal, and drag and drop between them. When you save your Maya® scene, your Slim palettes and shader connections are saved along with it, so the next time you open your Maya® scene, all the Slim information is right there, too.

A Slim allows intuitive shader editing

 
Versatile Environment
 
Slim allows artists to create shaders without programming, but Slim's sophisticated environment gives technical shader developers the ability to fully customize Slim for the needs of any studio. With Slim scripting, repetitive tasks can be automated and customized workflows can be developed.  
 

Layer Your Building Blocks
 
Build new shaders from the ground up, including layered shaders, simply by creating connections with Slim’s powerful set of building blocks. The building blocks come in a variety of types, from surfaces to functions, from image files to animated Maya® attributes. There are enough building blocks to create innumerable types of shaders, and once the techniques are mastered, Slim makes generating a wide range of high quality procedural shaders, quick and easy.

Build shaders in the graph editor

 
Build Your Own Blocks
 
Slim is highly extensible, allowing developers to go far beyond Slim’s set of core building block functions. Using the familiar RenderMan shading language, developers can modify the existing set of building blocks, or write completely new blocks, shader templates. So instead of writing a completely new shader, developers can now just write a shader template, which can be used as just another “block” in Slim.

 
Slim Stands Alone 
 
For even more potential, Slim can be run as a completely independent tool, in stand-alone mode. This allows genuine RenderMan shaders to be authored for custom productions, which can be used in any RenderMan complaint pipeline.