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

More powerful and inspiring than the superheroes it moves on the big screen, the Renderman 3D graphics engine pushes animation towards the photorealistic as anyone who has seen the A Bug's Life, The Iron Giant or Toy Story movies could attest.Advanced RenderMan, written by two long-time employees of Pixar Animation and early participants who helped define of the RenderMan standard, is a clear, concise and technical exploration of this computer graphics and animation rendering tool. The first section introduces RenderMan, computer graphics concepts, and mathematics, followed by a section on "Scene Description". This includes chapters on "Describing Models and Scenes in RenderMan" and "Handling Complexity in Photorealistic Scenes". Sections 3 and 4, "Shading" and "Tricks of the Trade", supply the meat of the book and make it worth the cost of admission. These sections include examples and insight from not only a technical perspective, but a cinematic one. The chapter "Storytelling Through Lighting" should be required reading for beginning computer animation artists. There are numerous colour plates, including some rendering tests from Toy Story. These show the same scene (Andy's room) using different lighting and colour palettes, each suggesting a different time of day. Given the difficulty of the book's subject, 3D artists or animators with limited technical chops, amateurs or hobbyists may be better served by something more general. This is, however, an outstanding reference for CG technical directors, or for anyone with experience in graphics and 3D programming. It is filled with coding examples used to create RenderMan shaders, and case studies citing which techniques were used to create a specific look in, for example, Toy Story or A Bug's Life. The book has no accompanying CD, but the publisher maintains a web site from which code snippets and examples can be downloaded. At first, this seemed inconvenient, and merely a way to cut production costs, but one quickly realises that this is an excellent way to keep the examples current. The field of computer graphics and animation is moving at the speed of light, and the examples and tutorials must move with it. But have no fear--RenderMan is here. --Mike Caputo, Amazon.comRead More