Whats New - Version 5.0.1

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• Cursor popup
• RAT shaders
• Shader/Slim copies (Pixar specific)

Cursor popup
The popup activated by the right mouse button (MacOSX control + click), or enter (numeric keypad) now checks if the text it selects is a graphics file format that can be opened using Pixar's sho, ptviewer, brickviewer, Apple's QuickTime Player or Shake's Flipbook - figure 1.

Files with the following extensions are opened using Pixar's sho,

tex
tx
z
depth
zfile

Files with a ".bkm" extension are opened using Pixar's brickviewer. Files with a ".ptc" extension are opened using Pixar's ptviewer.

Files with the following extensions are opened using Shake's Flipbook,

bmp    exr    png    iff    xpm
sgif   alias  rpf    cineon jpeg
tif    tga    dpx    jpg    pbm
pal    tiff   sgiraw sgi
nri    avi    rla    juv

Files with a ".mov" are displayed using Apple's QuickTime Player.

Opening Web Pages
Activating the cursor popup within a block of text beginning with "www" or "https://" will cause Cutter to display the web page with the users preferred browser. If, however, the shift key is held down when the popup is triggered, Cutter will display the source code of the web page - figure 2.

figure 1

figure 2

RAT shaders
In addition to being able to load system and user shaders Cutter can now load the shaders that ship with Pixar's RenderMan Artist Tools. The path to the RAT directory must be specified with the Preferences tool - figure 3. The RAT shaders are only read if the user has selected the "add RAT shaders to menu" checkbox in the Options tab of the Rman Tool - figure 4.

The shaders menu color codes the shaders based on their "origin" - figure 5.

figure 3

figure 4

figure 5

Shader/Slim copies (Pixar specific)
If the user has specified the path to their shaders directory (figure 6) Cutter will direct the RenderMan shader compiler to save its .slo files in that directory. When using Pixar's mtor plugin with Maya, shaders (aka appearances) can be imported from the users shader directory. Cutter generates a slim (appearance) document for each compiled shader. The slim documents include the full path to their shader, for example,

    slim 1 appearance slim {
       instance surface "foo" "//C/shaders/foo" {

This is fine when the Maya scene is rendered on the users local computer but the absolute path causes errors when a Maya project directory is moved to a render farm.

The path to the shader can be relative if the shader (and its slim document) are stored in Maya's project "rmanshader" or "rib" directory. In addition to specifying a fixed "shaders" directory, users can now nominate an additional (temporary) directory in which copies of their ".slo" and ".slim" files can be saved by Cutter - figure 7. For example, if the user selects the "rmanshader" directory the path to the shader in a slim document would be of the form,

    slim 1 appearance slim {
       instance surface "foo" "rmanshader/foo" {

figure 7

figure 6