The development of Shaderbox, a renderman shader management tool continues, with its most significant release so far, Beta 0.6 with greatly improved application performance.
This is the most significant release so far. All the features that were initially planned as per road map to 1.0 has been implemented. Overall application performance has been greatly improved. This includes, undo-redo implementation, improved canvas with fluid navigation and clear rendering, faster file loading, automatic bug reporting tool, faster attribute editor and lot of bug fixing.
Please view the changelog for more information about this version.
ShaderBox is a visual node based RenderMan shader management tool from Pantheon Studios. It provides a customized workflow to create RenderMan shaders interactively in a nicely arranged graphical user interface. Artists and other professionals can quickly create RenderMan shaders and no programming is required. The tool is aimed for 3D artists as well as TDs and shader writers, how ever it slightly gives more weightage to 3D artists by providing an easy and straight forward environment to build shaders. Using ShaderBox artists can truly enjoy the creative aspect of building RenderMan shaders. In the hand of a skilled shader writer ShaderBox put more control where they can easily build node template of a RenderMan shader and expend the node library. This eventually benefits the entire development process and artists or less technical people of all levels can be a part of shading pipeline.
