RfM [RenderMan for Maya], Part II
Let us continue our exploration of RfM, by looking at more topics below.
Subsurface scattering
A luscious grape, a mushroom, a piece of marble - these are 'porous' surfaces where light penetrates the surface, gets scattered around before exiting (colloids such as milk behave similarly). This adds a certain extra "shading from within".
An easy way to do this with RenderMan is to use RfM, and add subsurf. calc. and control to materials in Hypershade - this scene is an example.
Environment lights (IBL)
This simple scene with a pair of teapots contains an environment light added via Hypershade.
Using RfM to add an environment light is extremely simple to do:
And once you create such a light, you can go into its AE to specify an environment map image and adjust attributes:
Note that for the image above, you can read in a .hdr file. For samples, see Paul Debevec's amazingly cool page.