Advanced Renderman: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures

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 world of computer graphics books is filled with fat, pricy tomes that are frankly little better than rehashes of the manual. "Advanced Renderman" is a completely different sort of book.While Renderman is the ostensible subject, the authors actually cover the entire graphics workflow-- and explain the "why" of it all. Their section on anti-aliasing, for example, is concise, complete, and makes clear the implications of all those little doo-hickeys in 3DS -- you remember the AR explanation better, because its based around how rendering works, rather than how a particular application works (which may change in the next rev, anyway)Smart guys, smart book-- highly recommended.

This is a great book, written in clear and understandable English. It proivded me (a novice) great information about the RenderMan interface. Not only did it provide a reference to the various API calls, but it also includes an introduction to the basic maths behind it, as well as chapters that discuss CG in general. A thoroughly well written, useful and informative book. It is indespensible for any RenderMan user and in fact, for any CG artist.

This book is written by six renowned professionals in digital lighting field. Even you are not a shader programmer, chaper 1 and 13 show the aesthic architecture of lighting composition and tell us the beauty of 'Photosurrealism'. The depth of each paper is just amazing and you can find more beautiful tecnical information from other papers written by the same authors.

Wow. That's all I can say. This is a collection of several inches of the kind of information you spend endless nights digging around the 'net searching for. It's not all just renderman related stuff, it also works with BMRT (which is free) and there's a great deal about how movies are made, as well as good art direction tips.You don't have to be a rocket scientist to read it, but there's still a lot of good stuff, especially about writing shaders, which was my main interest.To the authors: Great work! More! More! :-)