I will first go over what I WAS going to do this week. Renderman is awesome. We know this. But it works only OK with Blender. I worked out some kinks like camera loosing focus (both the render camera selection, and sometimes actually like...DOFed out) rendering scenes with many vertices would crash Blender (the fix it to save, close and re-open to get a render off) which is a total bitch, but I know how to fix it at least. So with all of these issues, I decided to use the program that Pixar more or less supports and that's Maya! As I went to download the demo, I remembered that Autodesk has an insane education licence and where do I work? A school district! NICE! Fucking free ass Maya! So I went through the process and downloaded and installed Maya and reinstalled renderman to properly grab Maya (which fixed some other issues I had with it in Blender, but not all of them) I opened Maya and hit Shft+A and nothing....okay...I didn't really expect that to work. Lets add a cube. Good, got that added through a menu. Hit "S" to scale and.....nothing. "G" to move? xyz to move on axis? No?

FUCK THIS IM OUT FOR NOW PEACE! And that was going to be my everyweek. Instead, more or less I played with settings and materials in Blender/Renderman lol. Fuck that other shit for now. I wanted a subsurf material that calculates emission surfaces if they are inside the subsurf mesh. The thumbnail is what I came up with as far as a testing mesh goes :P I actually tried to make something cooler to test my materials (I will post what I got renders of) but I ended up with some extruded text for consistency sake. This particular material on the Fuck is frosted glass as I am still unable to do what I want with subsurf. That will need more work. And boy is it hard to test materials when render times are so long. At least with cycles I could toss it in a scene and know in 20 seconds if it's a good mat, but renderman takes 4x longer for the same output! Today actually I made a neat shape (a little more complicated than extruded text) and started messing with materials and it's actually pretty cool! The shape kinda looks like faces when I use specific materials lol. I also played with physical camera settings like chromatic aberration, lens distortion, DOF, vignette ect. I will post all that I have, they took so long that I only have a few and they are terrible. Also I thought render times were bad before! Tack on some more time if you want to use the physical camera settings...So for this reason. I think I am going to build a 16 core 32 thread render server. Older (3 year old) 8 core Xeons are going for only $60 a piece and the rest of the computer is easy. I parted it out at below $700 so I think I will do that soon. (Zach does?) Still lots of fun. It's going to take a while to get used to this amazeballs engine. But yeah, I might still get octane or something, or just deal with cycles now that I CAN put it through renderman if I want to.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5gRarvHyXZSTW9IVDE1UUN0ZVU