Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

Still an excellent reference on shader writing and Renderman. Now that other rendering softwares have become more popular in large studios (Arnold/V-Ray) you'd think this book might be outdated. But not so. The first few chapters on the concepts and math behind geometry, and the math about how shaders (any shader) works is still worth having this as a rendering reference.

This read should help me understand CGI.Thank You!

This is pretty much the bible for anyone who uses renderman daily. Even if you are not a programmer this can be a great reference for those things the programmers talk about :)

Great photos, descriptions, and complete RSL code to better understand pixar

great book, answers questions about concepts I've always wondered about

I bought a new one but the cover is worn out and the printing is skewed. It is shaped like a trapezium.

It's been 3 years since the last review of this book. I'm writing this review at the end of 2009 so hopefully it will still speak as to how relevant this book still is. I'm a TD at a VisualFX studio in Santa Monica. I get tasked from time to time to write tools to make our production process more efficient. This time it was writing an instancer to load our geometry in at render time so we didn't have to wait for the RIB files to generate.I got most of everything working, but was ending up with some random crashes that seemed almost impossible to trace through GDB or strace since they seemed to be all over the place. After some conversation with coworkers, we were able to track down the problem to how data was getting passed off to PRMan. However, if you've worked with PRMan at this level and have had to consult the RI spec day in day out, you might remember that one of the major holes is the lack of a detailed data layout scheme for data being passed from primitive variables to shaders.Like an older viewer said, I spent hours one night look all over the net to find some information. Nothing too useful. Finally, I decided just to look up a keyword in Advanced Renderman to see what if it might possibly have some discussion in it. Boy did it ever! It describes in details how variables break down at the primitive level and how they're promoted as they're passed on to the shader. This discussion is done primitive type by primitive type. Even though it's so detailed, they're all in just a few paragraphs! Not some crazy laborious description that just hurts your head to read. It's amazing. I felt so foolish that I didn't look in Advanced RenderMan earlier.This isn't the first time I've gone back to Advanced RenderMan and found details to a problem I'm working on. But I often second guess myself, there's just no way that one book could have almost all the answers to a particular subject. I'm happy to say I'm wrong.The RI spec is great, but the wording makes certain things a bit hard to digest and you have to guess on a lot of things.Advanced RenderMan is the exact opposite of that. It's so well written and easy to understand. It's like the Tyndale phrasing that the King James translators would eventually find themselves circling back to. Everything is succinct and well said.It's almost 2010 and if you're serious about knowing RenderMan, specifically PRMan, on a very deep level - I would suggest you get 5 copies of this book. I'm not kidding. You'll need 4 to read and mark in and 1 to keep around in case one of the other 4 falls apart.

The book covers everything from the basics of setting up a scene with lighting to writing your own shaders with detailed descriptions of the Renderman API. Overall, excellent overview for the intermediate graphics prefessional.

i received safely thanks