> Well renderman is really great with all that stuffs, there is no
> render time difference between a bump or a real displacement
> map ... it's really super fast.
> The wrong side is a super slow raytracing :'(

Back a while ago some guys had an interesting project where they captured the polygon output from a RenderMan renderer (I think maybe AIR?) to get the kind of baked version of the geometry and then used it for STL / Rapid prototyping.

So it kind of allowed for shader-driven details but with mesh generation. For stuff like Knurling or dimples on shoe soles, etc... I think it was called GeoDump but they don't seem to have the page for it anymore. :(


> Btw do you have any plan in mind for rendering solution
> inside MoI for the future (MoI 8.0 ? :))

No real finalized plans yet, but it will probably start to get some attention in v3 I think.

My current thinking is that I may write a very simple and quick renderer that will be built in to do very basic stuff, but rely more on plug-ins / 3rd party type renderers for more advanced type things.

- Michael