Physically Plausible Shading
The Rman Tool->Docs->Beauty Pass now has two sub-menus that can be used to generate barebones rib files for use with non-plausible (classic) shaders such as spotlight and plastic or with physically plausible shaders.
Figure 1
The first time the "Plausible Shading" menu item, figure 1, is used to create a rib document Cutter will copy and compile the source code for several shaders to the users "rsl source" and "shaders" directories - figure 2.
Figure 2
Notification of compilation will show in the Process Monitor - figure 3.
Figure 3
The plausible shaders that ship with Cutter are modified, and renamed, versions of Pixar's example shaders,
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/plausibleEnvlight.sl
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/plausibleArealight.sl
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/plausibleGlass.sl
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/plausibleMatte.sl
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/plausibleSubSurface.sl
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/helloAS.sl
RenderManProServer-18.0/lib/rsl/shaders/plausibleSunLight.sl
The names of the shaders can be seen in figure 3. Note they all begin with the prefix "pp". The new barebones rib documents for this version of Cutter have an additional user Option,
#Option "user" "string quality" ["Preview"]
When the option is commented, or the value of "string quality" is "Good",
the ppXXX plausible shaders will use the true values of the parameters that
control sampling. When the option is uncommented, and its value is "Preview",
the shaders will override the parameters that control sampling to provide
faster, but less accurate, rendering. For example, ppAreaLight has a default
"maxSamples" of 100 but when "Preview" quality is active the shader uses only
24 samples.
There are also two additional barebones plausible shaders - figure 4.
Figure 4