AIR is designed to work well with a variety of 3rd party applications. This section lists some of the 3rd party software that has been tested with AIR.
"Massive is the premier 3D animation system used for generating crowd-related visual effects and character animation, based on artificial life technology.”
SideFx's advanced 3D products for visual effects offer good support for rendering with AIR. Rendering with AIR is supported by Houdini Master and Houdini Escape.
Houdini users: be sure to check out the Houdini section in the AIR user manual for tips on using AIR with Houdini.
Animal Logic‘s MayaMan is a professional-level plugin for Maya with many features geared towards the production of complex animation. MayaMan converts a Maya scene (including shading networks) into scene files and shaders for AIR, and MayaMan provides controls for adding AIR-specific options to a scene. MayaMan also supports BakeAIR, allowing expensive shading calculations to be baked to texture maps for accelerated re-rendering.
MayaMan Users: MayaMan requires an external cpp program to compile shaders. Windows users can download one here if you don't already have one. Unzip the archive to the bin directory of your AIR installation.
XSIMan acts as an easy-to-use and full featured interface between Softimage’s XSI and RenderMan-compatible renderers. XSIMan translates geometry and material information from within XSI. XSIMan offers many additional features designed to help exploit all the advanced rendering features available in the RenderMan specification. XSIMan also provides render job management features to allow users to fine tune their workflow.
DarkTree is a visual shader creation tool from Darkling Simulations:
"DarkTree 2.0 is an advanced procedural shader authoring tool. Its visual flow-based editor lets you interactively create photo-realistic procedural materials, surface shaders, and animated effects. DarkTree 2.0 includes 100 procedural components that can be combined to generate almost any texture or surface effect you need."
Any DarkTree shader can be rendered with AIR with the aid of Darkling Simulations RMSimbiont plugin (available from the Darkling web site).
Temerity Pipeline is the industry's first complete production control application designed for the film, television and game industries. Pipeline increases productivity and studio profitability by providing seamless control over distributed processing of jobs, revisions and storage management. Studio pipelines are managed through one environment allowing artists to spend more being creative instead of dealing with production issues.
Temerity Pipeline has full support for AIR, BakeAIR and their associated texture and shader utilities.
Smedge is an easy-to-use program for managing rendering tasks - whether you have a single-processor machine, a multi-processor computer, or a network. Jobs can be submitted to Smedge via a dialog for AIR or from a batch file or script. Even if you don't have a multi-processor machine or a network, Smedge is useful for queuing and managing a sequence of rendering jobs.
