1. Introduction

What is The Mops?

The Mops is a free 3D modeling environment for the RenderMan Interface.

What platforms does The Mops run on?

The Mops is primarily aimed at the platforms BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools, a RenderMan compliant renderer by Larry Gritz) runs on (Linux, IRIX). Win32 support should be considered experimental (even though an executable is provided) because it is largely untested! Due to limitations in the Win32 operating system(s) (no backlinking) and the current implementation of The Mops, dynamic loading of custom objects is currently not available on Win32!

For platforms where BMRT is not available (e.g. the little red devil) The Mops may be compiled with code from the Affine Toolkit with limited functionality, see the file INSTALL. In this case no parsing of shaders will be possible.

What are the features of The Mops?

Here is a short summary:

• RIB (RenderMan Interface Bytestream) export.
• Support for NURB curves and (trimmed) NURB surfaces, Boxes, Quadrics (Sphere, Disk, Cylinder, Cone, Hyperboloid, Paraboloid and Torus). All primitives may be combined with the common CSG operations Intersection, Difference and Union.
• NURB modeling includes extrude (with caps, holes and bevels), revolve (with caps), sweep and skin operations.
• Custom objects that may freely implement their representations (using OpenGL and RIB) and even small GUIs to edit their type specific parameters may be written by the user and dynamically loaded at runtime.
• Scripting interface: Tcl.
• Misc: instancing, arbitrary number of modeling views, object clipboard, independent property clipboard, console, single level undo, 3DMF import/export.