I was doing a little research on rendering and ran across an open source, command line render software program called Aqsis (pronounced axis).  

From the website:

 "Aqsis is a high quality, photorealistic, 3D rendering solution. It complies with the Renderman® interface standard defined by Pixar.

Aqsis comprises a command line rendering tool, a tool for compiling shaders in the RSL language, a tool for preparing textures for optimal use, and various developer libraries to enable integration with third party tools.

Aqsis is licensed under the GPL license, with some parts under the LGPL."


Aqsis will render a RIB file (RenderMan Interface Bytestream) that can be exported by Poser 6, possibly earlier versions and other programs as well.

For those that like to try this type of software, the way is:

http://www.aqsis.org/xoops/modules/news/

Additional information on Renderman is located here:

http://www.renderman.org/RMR/index.html

Let me no when you get it to work. I havn't figured out where it will help me on Poser renders. Would like to see what a good render from it would do. Perhaps someone could do a tutorial on it using Poser. Thanks for the link.

And for my part, I would like to show it to you, but I can't.

It was getting late when I found the site, so didn't do much reading, but the latest build is supposed to be stable.  I'll d/l this morning, and take a look.

Great a new Renderman compatible renderer!  It has been a while since Bluemoon went away.  I have been trying to work with a non-test Poser to POV-Ray export resder for a Radiosity but the traslation software is getting confused and making major mistakes with the texture map assignement.  Maybe this program can help.

WOW ! It worths a try   !! Thank you melamkish   !!

Tried the precompiled version for Linux, incompatible with my current installation of teh Standard C++ library.  Will have to try to compile it from source code.

I tried a quick test with a Poser 6 exported RIB.  Got a parser error.  Will have to take some time this weekend to look at the docs.

It works...sort of

Went to Pixar's website and read the Renderman Compliant specification.  I then took a look at a test rib I exported from Poser and made a couple of hacks to the file.  I finally got a partially rendered scene with enough errors to give me an idea of where to go next.

It seems that Poser's RIB specifies an output about the size of a pin head. Looking at the first few lines of the RIB looks like this:

##RenderMan RIB-Structure 1.0
##Scene Saved
##Creator Poser 4.0
##Frames 1
version 3.03
FrameAspectRatio 1.000000
ScreenWindow [-1 1.000000 -1 1.000000]
Projection "perspective"  "fov" [36.960341]
Clipping .01 1000.0
FrameBegin 1
Transform [1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.996195 -0.087156 0.000000 0.000000 -0.087156 -0.996195 0.000000 0.019716 -0.359022 1.530000
1.000000]
WorldBegin

I made the following changes:

##RenderMan RIB-Structure 1.0
##Scene Saved
##Creator Poser 4.0
##Frames 1
version 3.03
Format 640 480 -1.0
FrameAspectRatio 1.000000
ScreenWindow [0 1.000000 0 1.000000]
Projection "perspective"  "fov" [36.960341]
Clipping 1 1000.0
FrameBegin 1
Transform [1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.996195 -0.087156 0.000000 0.000000 -0.087156 -0.996195 0.000000 0.019716 -0.359022 1.530000
1.000000]
WorldBegin

I added or changed the bold items.  The Transform line is supposed to translate the camera position, but it still gives a parser error.  Also, Aqsis wants Tiff format textures not Jpegs.

I finally got an image big enough to see, but it was dark.

It's starting to work!  

Well, it seems the Format command has to be changed to render to your screen.  The screen window changes have to be made, also.  I haven't played with the Clipping other than to change it once.  Aqsis seems to ignore the parser error.

My assumption gathered from some of the Aqsis documentation about TIFF textures was correct.  My test file was Mayadoll in a bikini with hair and nothing else.  The rib file references the jpeg texture over 125 times.  Luckily I only had to convert about 5 or 6 jpegs to tif's.  Changing the file reference is another story.  With over 50,000 lines, notepad is very slow in finding and replacing anything.  

After I changed about half the file references to tif, I tried to render the rib file and got about half of a rendered picture.   

Since there was no background, everything without a texture was very dark, but the tif textured parts showed up nicely.  After the aniversary, I shall spend some more time trying to figure out how to get Aqsis to works completely.

I have gotten a render to work with this program.  After working a bit with hand editing of the RIB a bit as well.  IT seems though that the Poser 5 RIB export is a bit different than your version's export.

The format line already existed, but was sized to the workspace prefview size rather than that of the rende rsetting.  Have posted the results in the MBotW forum.

Finally got a complete render, so the above settings are a start for working with Aqsis in Windows from a Poser output.  

Something I should mention.  The default rendered picture name was ri.pic a PICT format. I saved my RIB to my C: root directory to make it easy to find, and that is where I found ri.pic.

Should be able to save it in a tif format based on the tutorial I'm hacking from.

It already is a tiff file.  The output filename is ri.pic but the format is tiff.  Also the program expects all texture maps to be tiff files, if they are not they are converted on the fly at render time.  Pixie on the other had also requires tiff file for texture maps, but it won't convert files to tiff, it will simply treat every texture map reference as returning black, 0,0,0