Figuring out Katana and Renderman

I think we can do this!  We have made lots of progress.

I have been figuring out what we need in our pipeline to make things work smoothly with Katana and Renderman.  I am making a big list that I would love to share during dailies sometime.

Here is a new Render.  I figured out what was wrong with the alpha channels. I'll post more as I fix other problems.

NOW's RENDER:

THIS MORNING:

Basic Katana breakdown of groups and nodes for reference:

1.alembics = alembic_in, importomatic, merge

        as of now, I think we need to export alembic geometery as subdivs, and make sure uv's are applied

2.shaders = PrmanShadingNode, NetworkMaterial (Bxdf terminal), merge

        all images need to be a .tex format.  there is a terminal command called txmake for that

3.assigning materials = materialAssign

        for alembic objects you have to click and drag directly from the scene graph

4.lights and camera = cameraCreate, GafferThree

        lights need to be hidden or else they will appear in the alpha channel

5.render settings = PrmanGlobalSettings, RenderSettings

        make sure you have an integrator

6.render output = PrmanObjectSettings, RenderOutputDefine

        this is where we can hide objects, set the displacement bounding box, choose the file path,

        choose the AOV's

In order to use an image in Renderman you are going to have to convert it to .tex

in the terminal:

1. go to the directory that the images are located in.

2. assuming you have a file named image.jpg, type the following:

        txmake image.jpg image.tex

This will convert your image to a .tex