Trying to figure out how the materials and colors will work.
I figured out how to get light fog to work in RenderMan! It doesn't look awesome yet, but it was pretty easy. RenderMan directly translates the Maya light fog! You'll notice, though, that the shadow lines in the fog are a little too sharp. That's because they're created using a depth map. Perhaps raytracing techniques and/or some volumetric noise will make this effect more realistic.
Additionally, I'm having an issue where Maya is not retaining my texture positioning from my referenced files, so some of my procedurally shaded wood objects have some odd wood grain. Eventually, though, I'd like to move away from procedural shaders to a file-based approach.
These renders are taking a very long time because RenderMan calculates shadow maps for all my lights in the scene. I'd like to find a way for RenderMan to just access a cached shadowmap for lights that don't move. This should speed up the testing process.
Here, I started experimenting with getting the kind of "slat" lighting look I found in MentalRay in RenderMan.
I played around with SLIM, experimenting with the velvet shader. I think this creates an interesting kind of fuzzy/shiny look, but I might go in a different direction and incorporate actual fur.