Policy Change
-
Glimpse deprecated - On Irix, Glimpse is no longer loaded by default.
Also, Glimpse is not included in the release but can be downloaded separately.
If you need to use Glimpse, first download the package and lay it atop a RAT
tree. Next make sure that you set a new environment variable: RAT_LOADGLIMPSE.
- New Menus - supporting all the new features of this release.
- Initial support for Maya Subdivision Surfaces. Hierarchical edits
are not supported. Per-facet parameterization is also not
supported. Also, due to a limitation in the Maya 3.0's API, the new
Auto Extrapolation feature is not available. It is available with Maya
4.0.
- Subdiv Auto Extrapolation. You no longer need to create
shading sets to apply different shaders to components of Pixar Subdivision
surfaces. We've added a new attribute "Extrapolate Components" to
control this behavior. When set, MTOR will automatically derive facet groupings
and attempt to maintain the appearance of a single continuous surface.
If you have a well-behaved and organized
mesh, you can parameterize and texture mesh components independently. This
technique, if applicable, is far superior to a workflow requiring the manual
specification of facet sets. For more details please refer to the subdiv
docs.
- Manual and Automatic RIB Archiving MTOR now supports the generation
of RIB Entity files which are appropriate for inclusion via RiReadArchive
and RiDelayedReadArchive directives. You can manually archive a scene or
selected objects by choosing the new RIB export option via Maya's standard
Export or Export Selected entries. MTOR also supports new auto archiving
functionality. Here you attach a Slim Archiver Appearance to a DAG node in
your scene. MTOR will automatically archive all geometry below that DAG
node. Slim's Archiver Appearance has several controls which govern the
archiving and archive referencing process. AutoArchiving nodes are also the
basis of the Level of Detail feature.
- Multi Segment Motion Blur MTOR now has the capability to output
multisegment motion blur directives to RenderMan. In certain cases, the
standard, two sample, linear blur doesn't sufficiently capture the motion of
an object. Now you can tag individual primitives or Auto Archive nodes with
a Maya attribute (mtorMotionSamples) to cause the generation of more finely
sampled motion. The support is limited to transform blur. Multi-segment
deformation blurs are not supported. To add multiseg motion blur to a
primitive, use the new Motion Samples submenu located in the Attributes
pullaside. This creates an integer attribute named mtorMotionSamples.
The default range should be 1 to 6 as PRMan has an arbitrary motion sample
limit of 6. Note that when present, the mtorMotionSamples attribute can also
be used to tag individual primitives for subframe motion even when your
global setting implies frame motion.
- CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) - added new attributes to control
the insertion of RenderMan CSG directives. You can now tag DAG nodes with
standard RenderMan CSG directives - primitive, union, intersection and
difference - to cause prman to perform CSG (booleans) in the renderer. MTOR
already has support for Maya's booleans but there are some effects that you
can only achieve in prman. For example, now you can motion blur the
difference between two objects. Current support does not include
visualization tools and requires that you understand boolean algebra and
RenderMan's CSG specification.
- Blobby Modeling - added experimental support for manual modeling of
RenderMan Blobbies. Now you can individually position, orient and scale
blobby primitives and assign primitive variables to them. Blobby primitives
can be combined with blobby operators by tagging DAG nodes with special
attributes. For more details refer to the prman appnote on blobbies.
- Slim Adaptors - see Slim release notes for more details.
- Context Render Global - can be used with Slim Adaptors.
- Slim TCL Boxes. These are like RIB Boxes but are
used to associate TCL scripting state with Maya objects.
- Maya's Level of Detail. Note that Maya's level of
detail doesn't support smooth transition regions.
- PRMan's Level of
Detail. The new attributes menu contains level of
detail attributes. Basically you tag a number of different model
representations as auto archiving. To each of these you assign
mtorDetailRange attributes. Next you group these nodes below a Maya
transform or lodGroup node and assign to it the MTOR LOD Control attributes.
The end result is that prman can utilize the most efficient representation(s)
for a given rendering and will smoothly interpolate between different reps.
- Shutter Context Render Global - controls MTOR's RenderMan
representation of the shutter and motion blur time coordination. When
set to stationary, MTOR always output's Shutter at time 0. This
makes archived RIB files more useful in that they can be included in RIB
from any frame of an animation. The old behavior is represented with a
shutter context of moving.
- Arbitrary Clipping Planes
- added support for the RenderMan 3.2 spec feature RiClippingPlane. You can use clipping planes to clip geometry
in your scene along any number of arbitrarily oriented planes. This
feature will be supported in Pixar's upcoming version of PRMan - release 10.
- Maya Particle Instancing MTOR now provides support for Maya's
particle instancer. The basic workflow consists of setting up a Maya
particle instancer and rendering. For more control, archivers can be
attached to the source geometry. There are, however, certain limitations as
MTOR does not support every type of per particle configuration. The
rgbPP and opacityPP attributes are now carried to the RIB file in the form
of RiColor and RiOpacity calls.
- Support for different versions of Maya from a single RAT
distribution. We now support Maya3.0 and Maya4.0. See the
installation docs for more details.
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