MTOR 1.2 Release Notes

Summary of Changes to MTOR 1.2

• Support for File Referencing
• Chord Length Parameterization
• Persistent, Freezable Reference Geometry
• Fixes for Glimpse crashes due to X Window resource limitations.
• Support for site-specific extensions to the TCL-based appearance parameter expression subsystem.
• Significantly faster RIB generation for scenes with no RenderMan shaders attached.
• Enhancements in memory management resulting in much smaller memory footprint for large particle runs.
• New RATUberlight shader.
• Support for multiple shaders attached to single subdiv surface primitives.
• Enhanced architecture for RIB Generators - support for Fuzzy nurbs.
• New Projections for magicSurface/magicLight.

Changes in 1.2 RC4

• Opening binary files which contain file references is not functioning correctly. We believe this is due to a maya API bug, which prevents MTOR from receiving the message indicating that the incoming file is being referenced. Maya ascii files are not affected, and are suggested for anyone working with reference files.
  Mtor deferred and distributed RIB generation has always saved a binary temporary file. This causes problems with scenes which contained file references. We've changed the default temporary file behavior. Temporary files will now be saved in the same format as the current open Maya scene file.

Changes in 1.2 RC3

• The Glimpse editor background was not visible on system where the monitor gamma was set to 1.0. The mechanism for applying the backgound, and the image source has been modified in this release. Please see Glimpse Appearance Editor for more details.
• Fixed a bug that appeared in RC2, which caused all texture references within Glimpse to appear as animated textures.
• Fixed older bug whereby once a texture parameter was assigned an animated texture, it always appeared as an animated texture.
• Added support for animation of "Map Depth" for shadows.
  Note: This change required an update of the mtorPartition data which is saved in the Maya scene file. Although RC3 will be able to read data files written with older releases, older releases will not be able to read data files written by RC3.
  Also note that if you will be using distributed RIB generation, MTOR will need to be updated on those remote machines, or RIB generation will fail.
• Fixed OBJPATH for lights.
• Reduced the error "spewage" associated with appearances that have Maya Attribute references that default to "world".
• Fixed TCL expression context for "Objects In Map" parameter. Now references to OBJPATH and OBJNAME are correct.

Changes in 1.2 RC2

• MTOR standalone behavior has been changed to give more correct behavior when running dynamics. In particular distributed RIB generation was broken for scenes which included Maya dynamics. MTOR now uses a script similar to the internal Maya function to "runup" the dynamics state, when necessary.
• MTOR's project directory was not being correctly set, when the plugin was manually loaded. This caused, at times, an error message indicating that RIB files couldn't be written during RIB generation.
• Fixed bug in file referencing which occurred when the referenced file had no file extension.
• Fixed bug causing RIB Boxes and RIB Generators attached to lightsources to be ignored.
• Fixed bug causing RIB generators to coredump on ExecHostCmd().

Changes in 1.2 RC1

• Fixed bug in scene files containing referenced files whereby shader icons did not indicate proper reference state. Note: MTOR plugin must be loaded prior to opening a file containing file references. If not, you may see an error indicating "Phase error resolving file referencing. Data from referenced files may be in invalid state." If this occurs, you will need to reopen the file.
• Fixed bug in selecting animated texture maps, whereby old path was retained.
• Mtor control renderglobal command now properly sets and updates value for RIBFormat.
• Fixed bug where defaultsurface calls were incorrectly emitted into the RIB stream as "defaultSurface."
• Fixed bug causing MAYA_PROJECT environment variable to be stepped on when MTOR was autoloaded.
• Added support for RAT_PROJECT environment variable. If you set this environment variable to an absolute path, all MTOR data will be stored relative to that location and the Maya settings will be ignored.
• Added ability to freeze reference geometry into __Pref vertex variable for selected objects at the current frame. New functions are in the VertexVariables menu.
• Added Re-key Appearances to the Attributes menu to provide access in the GUI to the recently added (1.2b4) "mtor palette uniqueify" command.
• Correct camera clipping planes are now output even when "Auto Render Clip Planes" is not set.
• Updated MTOR standalone RenderGlobal commands to be consistent with documentation.
• MTOR will now check the environment variable MTOR_PLUGIN_NOLOAD at plugin initialization. If this variable is set, MTOR will not load. This will allow animators and TD's to work on a file, without using an MTOR license.
  Note:When operating in this mode, there are a couple of important points to consider:
  • When opening a file containing MTOR data, Maya will warn you about unknown data in the file, and a possible data loss.
  • When the file is subsequently saved, the line "requires mtor.so" will no longer be included in the data file. This will prevent MTOR from being automatically loaded the next time the file is opened. Simply be certain that the MTOR plugin has been loaded prior to reopening this file.
• Added new display mode for mtorCoordSysNodes: 3 == draw cube.
• Fixed bug wherein unneeded shadows were computed. This only occurred if:
  • you have a RenderMan lightsource shader attached with no shadow requirements. and
  • depth map shadows is enabled within the Maya associated lightsource shader
• Fixed bug related to Referenced files and Appearance parameters. The new features of 1.2b4 failed when the references were first created (but worked after the file was saved and reloaded).
• Added support for timing RIB generation and rendering via batch-mode mtor. See the standard scripting reference for more info.

Changes in 1.2b4

• Added support for TOR extensions. Use TOR extensions when you want to add TCL procs and global variables for use in Glimpse/MTOR animated parameter evaluation / substitution. A new file $RATTREE/lib/rat/TOR.ini can be used to point Glimpse and MTOR to these external files. Furthermore, two new environment variables can be used to extend the definitions in TOR.ini:
  • RAT_TOR_INIT: the name of a TOR.ini-type file
  • RAT_TOR_EXTENSIONS: a list of files containing TCL procs
  More details can be found in $RATTREE/lib/rat/TOR.ini
• Added support for access to parameter value in expressions. If your expression needs to refer to its parameter's value, use the $VALUE variable. When the parameter is of type color, point, vector, or normal, you can also use the new variable $CHAN. For non-scalar datatypes, the expression is run multiple (3) times with the value of CHAN indicating the iteration count. At this time, we do not support access to other parameters within the same or other appearances.
• Modified treatment of scaled cameras and lights. Now, we normalize these coordinate systems to eliminate problems with scaled shadowmap bias. This also fixed a camera-matching bug where MTOR's orthographic camera didn't match Maya's if the orthographic camera had been scaled.
• Added new Glimpse and MTOR commands to "unique-ify" appearance keys in your scene. This causes Glimpse and *TOR to generate unique appearance keys for all appearances in your scene. In addition to modifying the appearance keys, this causes the keys associated with objects in your *TOR scene to be modified thereby ensuring the same relationship between objects and appearances. If you're experiencing problems with appearance key conflicts, use this command before importing any files. To assure that another scene is safe for importing, load that scene, issue the Uniqueify Appearance command, then save.
• Fixed bug causing "mtor findAppearnce -index 0" to spuriously fail in maya -batch mode.
• Significantly sped up RIB gen for prims with no RenderMan shaders attached.
• Added new mtor palette scripting commands:
  • you can now set the current appearance with: mtor palette currentappearance -index i or -key k
  • you can now specify an optional appearance indentifer to: mtor palette pickobjects -index i or -key k
• Fixed bug which caused incorrect motion blurred shading when referencing coordinate systems associated with geometric primitives.
• Fixed bug which caused backward creeping of Maya current time when shutter timing was 'center on frame' and motion blur was off.
• Fixed bug in appearance referencing. In some cases it was possible to open files (without references) and appearances would be marked as references.
• Fixed Glimpse / *TOR bug whereby errors in parameter animations expressions caused them to be disabled.
• References within Appearance parameters in referenced files now work. Specifically:
  • animated parameter expressions involving stmatrix or mattr work
  • references to external coordinate systems work
  • arguments to the shdmap,envmap,refmap commands are handled correctly
  • contents of the new hostcmd command are left unmodified. No attempt is made to parse the contents of the command for reference args. If you need to refer to another object from within a hostcmd, you can use the new global: $NAMESPACE to construct object names.
  Currently, due to limitations in the Maya API, the reference prefix, or NAMESPACE, must be the filename (this is the default behavior).
• Modified Glimpse to consume far fewer GLX contexts. When running Glimpse with Maya and using many appearance editor windows, it was possible to crash Glimpse with GLX allocation errors.
• Plugged a few bugs which occur when rapidly shutting down many Glimpse appearance editor windows in succession. These resulted in spurious warning message dialogs which occasionally would result in appearance editor windows that can't be closed.
• Canceling during immediate RIB generation is now faster. Instead of interuption between frames you can now interrupt between geometric primitives. Unfortunately this new feature uses C++ exception throw mechanisms which require SGI patch level #2758. If you need this feature first make sure you have the correct patch installed, then: setenv TOR_FASTERCANCEL. Now re-start MTOR. If you're not sure that your machine is up to rev, you can try running with this environment variable. You'll know if you're not up to rev if you crash when cancelling RIB gen.
• Cleaned up memory management. Deferred RIB Gen is now faster and more memory efficient.
• Fixed bug introduced in 1.2b3 which caused Maya polygon meshes to render with no shader. This bug also caused light-links on polygon meshes and subdivision surfaces to be ignored.
• Fixed bug wherein the bar character '|' could appear in filenames. This caused problems with proper operation of remote rendering.
• Fixed bug which caused spurious error messages related to missing instances of coordinate systems. This occurred when rendering computed maps that were once-per-job.
• Added new mtor scripting command: runup. This is only useful if you're writing your own mtor scripts. It is useful in the case where you're distributing RIB generation around a network of machine and in which there are dynamics in the scene. Runup causes all frames up to the requested frame to be "touched" and thereby results in proper simulation state.
• MTOR command projDir now returns the project directory name when in prompt mode, instead of "0" or "1".
• Fixed bug which caused loss of glimpse palette data when plugin is loaded during file-open.
• Made changes to magicSurf/magicLight to work around limitations in prman 3.8d (3.8.0.8). In some cases strange rendering artifacts were present.
• Fixed bug with "focus distance" parameter when using depth of field rendering. It always appeared in centimeter units independent of scene units.
• Updated ratUberlight to latest version.
• Added Lump Scale to smokeNfire shader.

Changes in 1.2b3

• Added support for multiple shaders for subdivision surfaces. Now, you can select groups of facets and use Subdiv->Create Shading Set. We needed to use non-shadinggroup sets to support overlapping set membership. After creating the new sets, you should attach a RenderMan shader to the sets. The Set Editor and Hypergraph windows provide access to these maya objects. Note that it's up to the user to ensure that the appropriate boundary conditions between the "shading sets" of a subdiv.
• Added support for frame-centered motion blur. Now you can choose your shutter timing from: Open on Frame and Center on Frame.
• Fixed bug in deferred or distributed RIB generation. If your scene had motion blur and frames were being generated randomly (not monotonically increasing), the motion blur was bogus or not present. This bug fix also address problems with motion-blur when rendering every n frames.
• Added new functions to control vertex variables on surfaces.
  • st: delete
  • st: random
  • st: chordlength
  • all: delete
• Added support for automatic chord length parameterization of NURBS. This is controlled via the (new in Maya 1.5) NURBS surface attribute: Texture Map->Fix Texture Warp. When animating deformations of chord-length-parameterized surfaces, its better to stick the parameterization at a particular time rather than allow it to change under deformation. You can use the new Vertex Variable function: st: chordlength (above) to achieve this effect. (And this works even if you aren't using Maya 1.5).
• Changed behavior of shader parameter declaration conflicts. When a shader parameter declaration conflict occurs, the conflicting shader parameter appears in the RIB stream declared in-line. Note that this feature requires prman 3.8.
• Fixed bug in the Delete Unused command. No longer do we delete RenderMan shaders attached to Maya shading groups or shading sets.
• Fixed a bug where MTOR used a light's template flag to determine whether the light was enabled. In Maya, when a light is templated, it still shines on the scene. MTOR now does the same.
• Clarified the policy on map computations when associated with templated or invisible objects. This issue is confusing, in part, due to Maya's conventions for controlling light visibility. Specifically, templated lights are present in a scene while templated objects are not.
  • Computed maps associated with invisible lights and cameras are computed. As documented in an application note, this feature allows you to calculate shadows from one light position for use by another light.
  • Computed maps associated with templated lights and cameras are NOT computed. This gratuitous choice was made to allow you to control map generation across many lights for temporary purposes. Note that these templated lights WILL be present in your scene unless you make them invisible.
  • Computed maps associated with invisible OR templated surfaces and mtorCoordSys objects are NOT calculated.
  NB: these changes might affect the way your existing jobs are calculated.
• Added new lightsource shader from SIGGRAPH 98 RenderMan course - ratUberlight. This shader, thanks to Barzel and Gritz, comes with full source code and is located under $RATTREE/lib/shaders/src.
• Moved installation location of Mondo.sl to $RATTREE/lib/shaders/src.
• Eliminated special treatment of shader parameters beginning with "__".
• Modified mtorBlinn, mtorPhong and mtorLambert to support ratUberlight.
• Updated documentation for Fuzz, Surface Parameterization, Subdivision Surfaces and MTOR Scripting.

Changes in 1.2b2

• We now perform string substitution on the "Objects in Map" and "Coordinate System" standard string parameters.
• Added a new string evaluation command (hostcmd or mel) for string parameters. This lets you evaluate arbitrary mel commands to return results to string parameters and is thus analogous to the mattr command which is used in numeric expression.
• A new RIB generator for generating fuzz on NURBS surfaces!
• A new MTOR scripting subcommand: mtor geom. Added to support the mtorFuzz RIB generator.
• Major modifications to RIB generator context API. If you use RIB generators, you must recompile them with the new RIBContext.h. These changes require the 7.2.1 patches to the MIPS Pro C++ compiler.
• Fixed mesh bugs. Polys that would render fine in Maya but appear broken in RenderMan now render correctly. This same bug caused occasional nan's to show up in RIB files.
• Fixed mesh vertex variable problems. In various condiations, vertex variables for meshes didn't make it to the RIB file. MTOR nows makes some effort to preserve vertex variables even when multiple polys are required to represent the mesh in RenderMan.
• Fixed mesh parameterization problem. "t" values were off by 1.
• Vertex variables associated with Subdivision Surfaces now work.
• Fixed bug which caused Maya to crash when using vertex variables and sprite particles.
• Fixed Mel command "mtor palette length", which was broken in MTOR 1.1.
• Fixed Mel command "mtor parameter setexpr" to work as documented. Setting the expression did not enable the animated expression as expected.
• Fixed mtor control scripting command for -rg cleanup. The correct way to set the cleanup global is:
  

      mtor control setvalue -rg cleanup -value "rib tex map"

  See *TOR Frequently Asked Questions for more information.
• Fixed bug causing spurious error messages during selected-object-only rendering.
• Fixed bug in which MTOR renderings didn't update texture maps due to texture source modifications.
• Fixed multiple documentation link errors referencing RenderMan documentation. Note: for links to work correctly, the prman directory (or symlink) must be installed in the same directory as rat directory. For example, both directories should reside in /usr/local.

Changes in 1.2b1

• Support for file referencing. If an appearance in the glimpse palette indicates Ref, the parameters associated with the referenced files will always override values in the master file. NB: this feature requires an update to Glimpse. Make sure you install all new components of this distribution.
• Support for Export Selected.... If you're using Maya 1.5, you no long need to manually select the MTOR partition.
• Fixed subdiv plugin to redraw if ignoreEdges or interpBoundary changes.
• Sped-up subdiv plugin recalc time.
• Fixed bug which inserted additional undo command. You no longer have to undo twice.
• Support for mtor parameter setexpr... This allows you to set the glimpse parameter expression with Mel.
• Fixed bug in motion blurred curve RIB output.
• Fixed bug of redundant error reporting of missing looks
• Fixed spurious error message related to light links.
• Added missing STMatrix0 and STMatrix1 parameter animation commands.
• Added two new display modes for mtorCoordSys
• Added two new projection modes to magicLight and magicSurf
• Added new parameter to magicSurf which allows you to gather frontal magic lights.
• Fixed bug in deferred RIB generation. Maya was reporting cycle check errors to stdout and this caused problems for alfred.
• Fixed bug in camera matching. Camera offsets now match the Maya camera. There may still be problems with the overscan film fit mode.

Summary of Changes to MTOR 1.1

Support for prman 3.8

• Support for Subdivision Surface primitives
  • render polymeshes as subdivision surfaces
  • control creases with standard Maya edge hardness attribute
  • using Maya 1.5 (in beta at this writing), specify crease and corner hardness for subdivision surfaces.
• Visualization of Subdivision Surfaces
• Support for Secondary Displays and their Quantization settings
• Support for Soft Shadows

Support for Maya 1.0.1 and Maya 1.5

• mtor (batch) checks out read-only Maya license by default. Use the new -editlicense if you are scripting mtor for other than RIB generation.

Other New Features

• MEL Scripting
  • mtor palette deleteunused: deletes all unused appearances from glimpse palette.
  • mtor palette pickobjects: picks Maya objects attached to current glimpse appearance.
  • mtor palette currentappearance: returns the key associated with glimpse's current appearance.
  • mtor palette showpicked: returns a list of keys assicated with Maya's current selection.
  • mtor palette deleteappearance
  • mtor palette copyappearance: makes a duplicate of the specified appearance.
  • mtor getversion - provides info about the MTOR build environment.
  • mtor palette newappearance now returns a handle that can be used in subsequent mtor appearance commands.
  • mtor appearance get/setexpr: control Glimpse parameter expression strings
• Glimpse Scripting
  • New variables: $OBJNAME, $OBJPATH, $o expand to the current object. Greatly expanded range of standard tcl function calls. All functions in the standard tcl "safe" interpretter are supported.
  • Extended variable substitution in RIB Boxes. Now it's equivalent with standard Glimpse Animated Parameter syntax.
• Painting RenderMan Vertex Variables with Maya Artisan
• Source code for Standard MTOR Shaders can be found at $RATTREE/lib/shaders/src.
• You can now attach RenderMan shaders to Maya Shading Engines.
  1. Select the Shading Engine node (best done through the hypergraph)>
  2. In glimpse, select the desired appearance and then Attach.
  3. The order of precedence is: object shader, shading engine shader, shading engine approximation.
• Support for multiple shader attachment to Polygon Meshes. Support for different shaders on facet components within a single Polygon Mesh primitive. First select a subset of facets in a mesh. Next attach a Maya shading group. Finally attach a RenderMan shader to the shading group.
• A new userPref has been added that controls saving of Glimpse icons into the scenefile. Scenefiles with large Glimpse palettes can benefit from quicker load and save time by setting this parameter to 0 (zero) in both the glimpse.ini and mtor.ini files.

   set userPrefs(saveIcons) 1  (or zero to disable icon saving)
        -or-
      LOCK userPrefs(saveIcons) 1 (this prevents user from changing) 

  System adminstrators can change this parameters in the $RATTREE/lib/glimpse/glimpse.ini and $RATTREE/lib/mtor/mtor.ini files. If not disabled using the LOCK syntax, individual users can set these preferences in their personal preferences files $HOME/.pixarPrefs/glimpse.prefs or $HOME/.pixarPrefs/mtor.prefs.
• Particles with 0 opacities aren't output when rendering them as spheres, sprites or squares. This can greatly reduce the size of your RIB files.
• Added control over light effects via its visibility and template attributes.
• Added support for constant string primitive variables.

Bug Fixes

• MEL Scripting
  • mtor palette import now correctly returns palette length, and updates internal state, allowing new appearances to be referenced in same mel script.
  • Setting parameters of type string array is fixed
  • Fixed bug that caused many MTOR mel parameter commands to crash.
  • Fixed bug in mtor appearance name -newname
  • MTOR commands now work in maya -batch mode.
  • Several commands had problems in looping expressions. These were related to synchronization with Glimpse and have been fixed.
  • Fixed bug related to setting parameter values which have associated option menus.
• Translation
  • Corrected RIB output with Maya exclusive lights. (MTOR 1.1RC4)
  • Corrected RIB output when only displacement shader or RIB box was attached to geometry. (MTOR 1.1RC3)
  • Orientation of one-sided polymeshes was reversed.
  • Reference Geometry was missing when doing distributed RIB generation.
  • Vertex Variable declarations are now in-line.
  • Problems related to light linkage and set membership have been fixed.
  • Texture parameterization on polysets and projection shaders has been fixed.
  • RenderMan rendering invoked through Maya batch mode failed. This has been fixed.
  • Fixed bug introduced during beta in light links. Light links now work when RenderMan shaders are attached to objects.
• GUI/Glimpse
  • Filepicker now properly displays typed-in path contents.
  • Support for selection of sgi and iff image files for automatic conversion to RenderMan .tex format.
  • X-Windows paste into text widgets now works. This came at the cost of disabling the auto-select on focus-in feature.
  • The Glimpse animated parameter function: MayaAttribute now supports more general references to maya attributes.
  • Project Preferences weren't saved properly.
• Miscellaneous
  • Fixed bug causing crashing of O2/Octane workstations when rendering selection only, and selection was empty. (MTOR 1.1RC4)
  • Fixed bug (MTOR 1.1RC2) causing deferred RIB generation to fail on Maya versions 1.0 and 1.0.1.
  • Fixed bug causing soft shadows to fail with frame chunking.
  • Fixed bug where mtor command getvalue would cause Maya to crash when retrieving value from unknown or deprecated shader parameters.
  • Fixed bug where mtor -editlicense sense was reversed.
  • Fixed bug that caused Maya to crash when MTOR license check failed.
  • Fixed bug in "it" related to improperly scaling of sgi format images.
  • Fixed bug in which camera controllers attached to point lights with frequency: "Once Per Job" didn't work.
  • Unique names for temporary maya scene files for deferred or distributed RIB gen weren't unique.
  • Shadows with positive penumbras are now calculated correctly.
  • Pixel Aspect ratio is functional.
  • Attempting to write RIB to a non-existant directory will no longer crash Maya.
  • Particle motionblur blocks are now correctly emitted.
  • Picking an appearance with texture reference to non-existant directory would cause a crash. This has been corrected.
  • Magiclights now have correct transform block when used with motionblur.
  • Shadow tranform block with motionblur has been corrected.
  • Sprite size parameters should now affect the sprite size during shadow rendering.
  • AgeNormPP on particles was incorrectly initialized causing nan values to be put into the RIB stream. This has been corrected.
  • ratmosphere and the RAT volume shaders have been updated to provide a shading mode that more correctly handles transparent objects.
  • Fixed licensing problems when using the Maya renderer.

Known Bugs / Limitations

• Subdivision Surfaces
  • Face visualization isn't working
  • Corner visualization doesn't match prman
  • Error messages/recovery for invalid poly mesh topologies leaves a bit to be desired. Currently messages are reported to stderr. These messages might be difficult to track down it you launch Maya from your desktop and have no console.
  • Texture parameterization on meshes with more than one UV coordinate per vertex can't be translated. Meshes are output with the RenderMan default parameterization.
• Maya Translation
  • MTOR shaders aren't imported properly during file referencing
  • MTOR shaders aren't saved properly during export selected
  • MTOR shader attachments are associated with the shape node at the time of attachment. If you perform any operation on your object that convert the shape node to a temporary node (like trim surface does).. The shader will still be attached to the temporary node and not the new node. The effect will be as though the shader was lost.
• Versions
  • There are currently 6 different MTOR builds. Please make sure you're using the correct version. In particular if you're using Maya 1.0. deferred RIB generation using MTOR for Maya 1.0.1 & 1.5 will fail.

Changes in MTOR Version 1.1b3

• Moved Subdivision Surface visualization support into separate plugin
• Fixed bug that caused Maya to crash when MTOR license check failed.
• Fixed bug that caused many MTOR mel parameter commands to crash.
• Fixed bugs in ST parameterization on Subdivs.

Changes in MTOR Version 1.1b2.1

Note: MTOR 1.1b2.1 is primarily a release to provide MTOR support for the various Maya and RenderMan releases. At this moment, we have to make builds for Maya 1.0 and Maya 1.0.1. For each of these versions, we must also build a RenderMan 3.7 and RenderMan 3.8 compliant version. The "About" boxes in both Glimpse and MTOR will indicate the appropriate RenderMan version.

If you must run multiple versions of these applications, you will need to install each version, and make changes to the RATTREE and RMANTREE environment variables.

• Added MtorStartup.mel script changes to enable/disable RenderMan 3.8 features.
• Fixed bug disabling soft shadows introduced in 1.1b2.
• Fixed bug disabling curve rendering introduced in 1.1b2.

Changes in MTOR Version 1.1b2

New Features

 

• New visualization for subdivision surfaces! Use RenderMan->Subdivision Surfaces->Mesh as Subdiv to create a new maya node: mtorSubdivNode. This node causes a visualization of the RenderMan subdivision surface to be drawn in your Maya window. It takes into account the edge hard/smooth attribute controlled by: Modeling->Polygons->Edges->Soften/Harden. The node has two attributes: one enables/disables the visualization, the other controls the number of subdivision steps to calculate.

   

• Support for RenderMan 3.8 multiple output displays.

   

• Surface shaders can be assigned directly to Maya shading groups. Now you can either attach RenderMan shaders to objects or to Maya shading groups in the multilister. RenderMan shaders attached to the surface take precedence over the shaders associated with Maya shading groups.

   

• Support for different shaders on facet components within a single Polygon Mesh primitive. First select a subset of facets in a mesh. Next attach a Maya shading group. Finally attach a RenderMan shader to the shading group.

   

• New MTOR MEL commands
  • mtor palette currentappearance
  • mtor palette showpicked
  • mtor palette copyappearance
  • mtor palette deleteappearance

   

• mtor palette newappearance now returns a handle that can be used in subsequent mtor appearance commands.

   

• Glimpse animated parameters now have access to the name of the object to which they are attached. See Glimpse Animated Parameters for more information.

   

• MTOR now throws away completely transparent particles when generating RIB files. This should improve RIB generation time, and decrease RIB file size substantially.

   

• A new userPref has been added that controls saving of Glimpse icons into the scenefile. Scenefiles with large Glimpse palettes can benefit from quicker load and save time by setting this parameter in both the glimpse.ini or mtor.ini file.

  
      set userPrefs(saveIcons) 1  (or zero to save icons)
       -or-
      LOCK userPrefs(saveIcons) 1 (this prevents user from changing)   
      

  System adminstrators can change this parameters in the $RATTREE/lib/glimpse/glimpse.ini and $RATTREE/lib/mtor/mtor.ini files. If not disabled using the LOCK syntax, individual users can set these preferences in their personal preferences files $HOME/.pixarPrefs/glimpse.prefs or $HOME/.pixarPrefs/mtor.prefs.

Bug Fixes

• Doublesided polygons with normals sometimes caused incorrect rendering. This has been fixed.
• Maya 1.0.1 caused deferred RIB generation and standalone mtor to fail with rld error. This version, MTOR 1.1b2, requires Maya 1.0.1 or higher.
• Filepicker will now support typed partial pathnames
• Texture parameterization on polysets and projection shaders has been fixed.
• Keyboard select and paste into Glimpse text boxes now functional.
• MTOR no longer ignores hidden and template attributes on lightsources.
• MTOR now saves RenderGlobal project presets.
• RenderMan rendering invoked through Maya batch mode failed. This has been fixed.
• MTOR now generates unique jobfile names for alfred. When multiple jobs were submitted simultaneously, they would fail due to job files not being uniquely named.
• MTOR now handles light links when objects are members of multiple sets.

Changes in Mtor Version 1.1b1

RenderMan 3.8 Features

• First level of support has been added for subdivision surfaces. A special mtor attribute is added to polymesh surfaces. When the attribute is on, the polymesh is rendered as a subdivision surface mesh. Edge hardness can currently be specified by picking the edges, and using the Maya polygon hardness tool to define the edge to be hard or soft.

  In the future, we are looking for a way to allow for more precise specification of edge hardness, as allowed by the RenderMan subdivsion primitive.

   

• Soft Shadow support. Use the RenderMan->Attribute menu to attach an attribute defining soft shadows. A dialog allows for defining the area of the light array, and the number of lights to participate in the soft shadow creation.

Bug Fixes

• Shadows with positive penumbras are now calculated correctly.
• String arrays are now handled in mtor MEL scripts.
• Pixel Aspect ratio is functional.
• Mtor MEL script newappearance fixed.
• Mayachannel now handles array parameters like ramp.
• Attempting to write RIB to a non-existant directory will no longer crash Maya.
• Particle motionblur blocks are now correctly emitted.
• Picking an appearance with texture reference to non-existant directory would cause a crash. This has been corrected.
• Magiclights now have correct transform block when used with motionblur.
• Shadow tranform block with motionblur has been corrected.
• Sprite size parameters should now affect the sprite size during shadow rendering.
• AgeNormPP on particles was incorrectly initialized causing nan values to be put into the RIB stream. This has been corrected.
• Animated parameters have a new variable $obj, which contains the name of the attached object. This can be used in a shader to calculate a special per object texture name.
• Ratmosphere and the RAT volume shaders have been updated to provide a shading mode that more correctly handles transparent objects.

Changes in Mtor Version 1.0

• Glimpse crashed when using references like [refmap coordSysShape] on some processor types. This has been fixed.
• Changed default behavior or directional lights with shadows. Bounding boxes will be calculated and used for bounding the shadow texture map, unless the shadow is created through a camera control object. If created via a camctl object, then the attached mtorCoordSys object will define the coordinate system for determining the correct screenwindow.
• Fixed mtor control getvalue -rg "renderglobalvar" command where "renderglobalvar" was not a proper RenderMan Global entry.
• Fixed mtor parameter commands where index value was out of legal range.
• Fixed mtor parameter slname command.
• Fixed mtor palette command findappearance. MTOR will now work with both findappearance and findAppearance.
• Fixed mtor pallete export command. Palette file is now created.
• Fixed mtor appearance name command. New appearance is now correctly named.
• Fixed compile mode of aliasParticle.so. Although this file is not generally needed with Maya, it is an example of creating a programmable RIB generator. RIB generators for Maya must be compiled with the -n32 option.

Changes in Mtor Version 1.0b04

• Added MEL support for palette subcommands: clear, import, export and newAppearance.
• Fixed minor memory leaks, enhanced memory efficiency for motion blur.
• Fixed bug with once-per-job computed maps.
• Fixed problems with browser-selected-animated texturemaps. Abyss behavior and timing information was lost.
• Fixed problems with MTOR's translation of spotlights. Now, the default spotlight matches coneangle and penumbraangle. This bug also affected the use of other RenderMan lightsource shaders in that the coneangle was twice too large. Finally, the barndoor support on the default lighting now supports penumbra.
• Fixed problem with new primitive-variable support relative to particle systems. No longer do we redeclare variables based on rendering type. No longer do we output variables ending in '0' or "Cache".

Changes in Mtor Version 1.0b03

• Fixed bug in stand-alone MTOR where temporary files, (/tmp/glimpseXXXXX), were not being removed.
• Fixed path problems with distributed ribgen mode in which the project location mount point was unknown to servers. Such problems are intimately tied to your NFS configuration and encourage the use of autofs over automount.
• Fixed crashing problems with distributed ribgen mode.
• Fixed "it" bug in which spurious crop regions are drawn. This commonly occured when double-click-closing a window atop another "it" window.
• Added support for camera depth of field rendering.
• Fixed bug in deferred RIBGen related to automatically generated names with the default extension feature enabled.
• Fixed bug in deferred RIBGen related to project searchpaths.
• Support for primitive variables.
• Fixed bug in MEL command: mtor palette findAppearance -name
• Fixed rendering of multi-point and multi-streak particles. Motion of additional particles is now coherent.
• Fixed problems with polymesh parameterization.

Changes in Mtor Version 1.0b02

• Fixed particle sprites. No longer use radius to determine sprite size. Now we support spriteScaleX,Y and twist and the per-particle variations.
• Fixed nurb translation bug: NURBS with rational component (w != 1) were translated incorrectly. This would typically cause odd undulations in the surface or other spikey things...
• There's a bug in the MTOR coordSysNode object which causes a crash during duplication. This bug is actually a maya bug and we're working with Alias to try to eliminate it.
• Modified import behavior so that RenderMan globals don't come in when importing a scene file.
• Moved MTOR data block from render partition to its own partition called (appropriately) mtorPartition. We've attempted to ensure backward compatibility with old scenefiles. As an immediate benefit, import scene now works. Soon, file referencing will work.
• Fixed bug in texture coordinates for polygon meshes.
• The "out of box" renderer now defaults to local:render. Many first-time MTOR users did not know to start the Pixar netrender server before running MTOR.
• Unloading of plugin is now possible. MTOR now releases the FlexLM license when being unloaded. One anomaly still exists, however. You'll notice that after unloading the MTOR plugin the RenderMan menu is still present in the menubar.
• Changed mayachannel and mch to mayaattribute and mattr. This is more consistent with Maya terminology.
• Changed mtor -wire option to -scene for Maya consistency. Fixed documentation to eliminate references to wirefiles.
• Licensing works better in all modes:
  • Plugin mode uses an mtor license.
  • Deferred ribgen (alfred and scripting modes) does not use use an mtor license. Note: this mode does use a Maya license. This may not pose a problem for nodelocked license holders.
  • Maya -prompt mode uses a license.
• Made changes to initialization and startup code. This allows the user more flexibility in splitting the RenderMan tree and the RAT tree into different directories. When MTOR first starts up, it attempts to find the mtor and glimpse executables. This is accomplished by searching directories relative to two Pixar environment variables. These variables are listed below:

   

  • RATTREE - checked first, overrides any other locations.
  • RMANTREE - checked if RATTREE is not defined.
  • /usr/local/prman - default path. If other environment variables are not defined, this is the default.

  Glimpse, mtor, mtor.so are now loaded by full pathname, based upon the variables defined above.

• The appearance browser now handles RATTREE distinct from RMANTREE. If they differ, an additional hotspot has been added to the browser for RATTREE shaders.
• Modified RAT.ini file to place $RATTREE/lib/shaders into system resource paths ahead of $RMANTREE/lib/shaders. This clears up problems when working with split $RATTREE and $RMANTREE. $RATTREE/lib/shaders is assumed to have the most current shaders.
• Modified MTOR Installation Notes to place the $RATTREE/bin prior to $RMANTREE/bin in the user path variable. When working with split $RMANTREE and $RATTREE, older installations of "it" can cause the incorrect framebuffer to be invoked.
• Fixed bug where "-cmd exit" on mtor (executable) command line would cause core dump.

Changes in Mtor Version 1.0b01

• Modified ratBarnDoor shader to allow light only in the positive z axis. Now you can treat this light just like a spotlight. The parameter "Disable Barndoor" disables this feature, as well as the barndoor effect in x and y.
• Added support for motion blurring of particle primitives. Since particle "primitives" don't have a default motionBlur attribute, they'll default to no blur. If you want them to blur use the Maya attribute editor to add a new attribute to the particle object. You should add the attribute motionBlur with type boolean. Note that the particle velocity is used to determine motion blur. Since particle velocity is used to calculate the tail in streak particles, motion blur is not supported for streaks.
• Added support for sprite-style particles. Sprite scaleX, scaleY and twist are supported. Sprites are translated into camera aligned bilinear patches.
• Added support for PREF geometry. Animating magicLights will now work correctly. 
• Removed the "jerk" when rendering still images. This jerk was caused by jumping to the reference frame to locate reference geometry and compute held maps. Now this action will only occur if reference geometry is actually required by an attached appearance, or if held maps (render once-per-job) are computed. If your scene requires these features, you can temporarily work around the jerk by setting the reference frame in your RenderMan Globals to the current frame. This jerk also caused the invalidation of any previous particle runup. To render a single frame in the middle of an animation with particles, set the reference frame as suggested above. See RenderMan Globals - Render Spooling - Frames for more information.
• Added support for coordinate system references in "default" appearances.
• Added support for coordinate system references governing map generation.
• Added support for penumbra angle for lightsources.
• Maya currently does not support area lights. In *TOR products, an area light is used as a way of adding a directional light with a barn door. The barn door can be used to limit the transmitted light to the barndoor rectangle, or be used as a guide for shadowmap creation. To create this effect in Maya:
  • Create a directional light.
  • Attach the ratBarndoor.slo shader to the directional light.
  • Create an mtorCoordSys object, from the RenderMan menu.
  • In the ratBardoor shader, enter the name of the mtorCoordSysShape object into the "Coordinate System" dialog box.
  • The barndoor light can now be completely controlled via the mtorCoordSys object.
• Using techniques above, you can also attach lightsource shaders directly to objects. This creates an exclusively linked light for the attached object, where the shadow texturemap area is controlled by the mtorCoordSys object.
• Fixed bug whereby coneangle was not properly passed to attched lightsource shaders.
• Fixed error reporting problem in which an error dialog created during rib generation or rendering would not close.
• Fixed bug in which projPrefs(sysRezPaths) was undefined causing TCL error dialog to appear.
• Fixed palette importing. Previously importing a palette reused the custom indentifications numbers of every appearance. This caused problems if the open scenefile palette already contained appearances with the same id as the palette to be imported. Now imported palettes, all appearances receive new unique identifiers.
• Fixed coordinate systems camera (it was reversed), and coordsys reference. This bug fix corrects problems visible when working with magic light and surface shaders using coordinate system references.
• Fixed crash bug using mtorCoordSys objects on O2 machines.

Special Caution with Mtor Version 3.0d05

It was necessary for us to change all of the internal ID's of Pixar's Maya based objects. Because of this change, you will not be able to use this version with old project files. If you read in an older project file, you will lose all RenderMan based data, and will need to reassign all materials, looks etc.

If you absolutely cannot afford to lose this data, then please install this MTOR in a new directory. You will only be able to use the older MTOR with these project files. As a suggestion to make conversion easier, open your projects in the previous MTOR, and export out the palettes. These can then be reimported with the newer MTOR, and only assignments will need to be redone.

We decided to make this change now, very early in the BETA testing rather than waste a lot of time engineering for backward comptability, so that we could continue on with bug fixes, and new important features.

Changes in Mtor Version 3.0d05

• Added new menu item to RenderMan menu. "New Coordinate System" creates an object in your scene that is guaranteed not to render, and should serve as a good reference or phantom object.

  You can attach Rib Black Boxes, or Camera Controllers to mtorCoordSysShape objects to cause additional renderings for reflections, shadows or environments. You can also use the name of this object in any shader "Coordinate System" parameter. You can also specify the name of this object to render an orthographic view.

   

• Added support for rendering 3D curves. See Rendering Maya Curves for more information.
• Added support for rendering Maya particles. See Rendering Maya Particles for more information.
• RenderMan Expert parameter in Glimpse now acts as a Global parameter. When selected, all shaders will display RenderMan expert parameters. This parameter is saved in preferences.
• Fixed NULL pointer reference in polysets. Bug was observed as crashing Maya when importing some Alias OBJ files.
• Fixed bug relating to local project resources. Bug was observable only when opening a project file immediately after setting the current project in Maya.
• Fixed mesh bugs related to non-existant UV coordinates.
• Fixed deferred Rib generation. MTOR now uses the location of the scenefile to determine the appropriate project location (exactly like ATOR). This can be overrideen during interactive use by setting the environment variable RAT_PROJECT, or via the projDir TCL command.
• If an invalid camera object was specified in the RenderMan Globals Display dialog, during RIB generation an error message was printed in the terminal window rather than in the Maya error dialog area. This has been fixed.
• Magic light and surface shaders (magicLight.slo and magicSurf.slo) are now functional.
• Texture wrapping modes are now functional.
• Fixed RAT.ini file syntax error which caused $RATTREE/lib/shaders to be to be omitted from system resource path. This resulted in RenderMan being unable to locate the RAT specific shaders. This particular error occurred only when the Artist Tool applications and RenderMan Toolkit were installed in different directories.

First-Look Release (pre-beta)

There are several known issues/problems with this release. Here are a few of them.

• incomplete implementation of MEL scripting
• particle system support has problems in interactive mode. This is because MTOR sets time to the reference frame (frame 0 by default) before rendering. This has the effect of invalidating the current particle state within maya. Now, particles are gone. To get particles in your images, you currently must render sequences of images.
• P-REF (reference) geometry is not quite there yet. This means that magiclights on deforming geometry doesn't work (among other things).
• mtor standalone app requires license (even in alfred mode)
• MTOR isn't totally functional in maya -prompt mode
• documentation is incomplete
• camera Depth of Field is unimplemented.
• cancelling during RIB Generation is broken.
• per-object motion blur may be broken in some circumstances.
• the version of Glimpse that ships with MTOR isn't entirely backward compatible with the RAT 2.5 release. This means that you should try not to use it with ATOR. If you insist on doing this, make sure to:
  • setenv RAT_NOSAVEICONS 1
  • setenv ALIAS_WORKENV $HOME (if you don't already have this set).