Slim Concepts
An appearance is an entity that controls all or some aspects
of the visual appearance of objects in your scene. Ensembles,
shaders, Looks, functions, RIB Boxes
and Map Generators are all Slim appearances.
Appearances are referred to in a RIB file with a sequence of RIB statements
which we'll call a RIB Box. At the core of the RIB Box generated
by a shader is a RenderMan shader directive - something like: Surface
"plastic". In this example, plastic is the name of the Surface
shader. Since we can use the plastic shader to create a myriad of
plastics of various colors and shininess we make a distinction between
shaders and shader instances, or even better: masters
and
instances.
A palette is a collection of appearances. You can have
any number of palettes open simultaneously and each palette can contain
sub-palettes. Using the
Palette Editor you can create and
import appearances and organize your appearance collection. Palettes
can be stored as external .slim files and
can be encapsulated for storage within, for example, a Maya scene file.
A function is a kind of appearance that supports interconnectivity
and custom shader generation. One function can be connected to any
number of parameters from other functions and a set of interconnected
functions can be viewed as a graph to understand
their relationships. Functions are categorized by their type and certain
function types can be attached to objects in your scene. To render
a function, Slim converts your
network of connected functions into
a RenderMan shader.
A parameter is an individual control within an appearance.
Usually an appearance is comprised of between 2 and 20 parameters and these
parameters come in various flavors: colors, texture names, vectors, etc.
You can set the value of a parameter with interactive controls like: the
Color Picker, the File Picker, sliders, menus, etc. You can
also enter a TCL expression to determine
the value of a parameter procedurally. Certain parameters of
functions can obtain their values from another function.
The Appearance Editor allows you to
edit the parameters of an appearance. Use this editor to control
the values or the value providers for the parameters of an appearance.
A template is a special kind of function used to generate functions.
Templates live in .slim format files and are usually loaded when
Slim is launched. Slim comes with a rich collection of templates
and programmers are encouraged to extend the set.
Most of Slim's internal state can be queried and edited procedurally.
The Console can be used to probe the internals of Slim's TCL interpretter.
You can write and execute TCL scripts using Slim's object oriented scripting
support and your scripts can do everything from creating and importing
appearances to changing the way all texturemaps are referred to in your
palette.
A Workspace describes the global environment in which MTOR and
Slim operate. We use a workspace file to hold settings that pertain
across multiple scene files and that it's convenient to modify independently.
The workspace settings define the output locations of various MTOR and
Slim resources and also control the searchpaths for resources that are
referred to with relative pathnames. The Workspace
Editor is used to modify the workspace settings or choose a new
default workspace file.
The Preferences Editor lets you
edit standard preferences governing user interface and other operational
settings.
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