Overview

This is a 5 part tutorial series that provides visual effects artists with an introduction to Pixar's RenderMan for Maya.

Unlock the secrets of Pixar's RenderMan through a series of in-depth tutorials that focus on rendering an animation in Maya with photo-realistic materials and dramatic lighting.

In this tutorial series, visual effects artist Rusty Hazelden takes an animated shot from start to finish, and reveals all the techniques used to create the final animation with Pixar's RenderMan for Maya. No steps are left out and every detail is explained with easy to follow step-by-step instructions.

Essential topics include: adjusting Pixar surface material attributes to create the look of plastic, wood, and metal, applying texture maps to add more detail to surfaces, aging a shiny metal surface by adding a layer of tarnish, and using the RenderMan IPR to interactively develop materials and lighting in real-time.

Learn a wide range of lighting techniques that can be used to create a dramatic night time scene. Discover how to enhance the realism of a shot by enabling depth of field and motion blur. Explore the powerful Alembic workflow in RenderMan and find out how to assign materials to Alembic archives using the Dynamic Rules Editor.

Advanced topics include: using a light filter and light linking to control scene illumination, sharing 2D texture placement nodes to make shading networks simpler to maintain, fine-tuning the render settings, using the RenderMan denoiser to cut down on render time, and batch rendering the final animation.

About the Author

Rusty Hazelden is a visual effects artist with a passion for movies. He makes videos on YouTube about movies and visual effects techniques.