Can someone please educate me about Nvidias Gelato

[keltuzar]

Can someone please enlighten me as to how I can use gelato. I know it uses renderman standard codes to writes its shader and I also heard its probably the fastest renderer out there. I know its something to do with GPUs (which I really dont know nothing about).

Thanks in advance.

[malexander]

Gelato is a renderer that uses an Nvidia QuadroFX to do some of the rendering calculations. The QuadroFX doesn't render the scene in hardware, it just helps the CPU with parallel computation. It was designed by Nvidia, and the chief architect is Larry Gritz (so it can't be that bad ).

There's a plugin for both Maya and 3D Max, and also a RIB stream converter (which you'd probably use with Houdini). You need a QuadroFX 700 or higher.

Apparently Frantic Films has incorporated it into their pipeline for an upcoming film (Frantic Film story). There's more technical information at Nvidia's site, as well. (Nvidia Gelato)

[sascha]

(...)You need a QuadroFX 700 or higher.

You don't need a QuadroFX. Of course nVidia will never tell you. Every card above a GeForceFX 5600 will work as good as any QuadroFX (of course not as fast as a QuadroFX 4000). I run Gelato on a GeForceFX 5600 Ultra and it works very well.

[Rei Ayanami]

Sascha : is that navitely or with softmodding to pretend that they are Quadro's in order to run the software?

[sascha]

You need no modding, no software and no hardware mod. Gelato runs on every GeForce FX and 6 card with the default Detonator driver. Try it.

[dmaas]

However they claim they are free to add features that GeForces don't support at any time.

You need to download both Gelato and the plugin called Ribelato (linked on the nvidia website) to render RIB files. Until recently you had to convert shaders manually (Gelato uses a different syntax than Renderman SL) but there is now a work-in-progress automatica translator called rsl2gsl.

My experience with Gelato so far has been disappointing. Even with Ribelato there are a lot of difficulties translating RenderMan content to it, and the software itself is rather buggy.