Here's some stuff you may find helpful for doing the assignments and the final project.
There is a course newsgroup, ubc.courses.cpsc.426.
The open source RenderMan renderer we will be using, Pixie is now installed on the undergrad Linux machines. Pixie provides a program called "rndr" which takes RIB files as command-line arguments and renders/executes them (typically producing tiff image files). Note that image files for many frames take up a lot of space, so again be sure to do this in a subdirectory of /var/tmp/ on one of the Linux machines (not Solaris!).
Temporary bad news: the default rndr script is not working. Instead use ~cs426/pixiehome/rndr (or even alias rndr to this alternate script).
Hopefully we'll soon have Pixar's RenderMan up and running here.
Some links that may help with learning and using RenderMan:
You can use ffmpeg to encode separate frames of animations into MPEG-4 movies, and then ffplay, mplayer, QuickTime, etc. to play them back. (I have installed ffmpeg and ffplay on the cs-grad Linux machines, and mplayer is usually available too.) Note that ffmpeg does not accept tiff files as input: you must first use convert to convert each tiff file into, say, a ppm file.
As an example, suppose you have a directory full of RIB files, one per frame of your animation (frame0000.rib, frame0001.rib, ...), that generate similarly named tiff files. Then the following csh script will produce an MPEG-4 movie from them:
Note: you can end up using a lot of disk space for temporary data files and images while you're creating animations. Rather than using precious NFS file server space (and probably going over quota) for these temporary files, stick them on the local /var/tmp directory (inside a directory you create), make your animation, and then save just the compressed animation file in your home directory (or wherever you want). Note that files in /var/tmp may be deleted at any time and are not backed up. Please remove your temporary files after you've made an animation---there's no sense wasting the space when other people may need to use that machine.