Rendering for Beginners (RfB)
Companion site

'Rendering for Beginners' is the fourth book devoted exclusively to RenderMan (the other three are 'The RenderMan Companion', 'Advanced RenderMan' and 'Essential RenderMan Fast'). You might also like this 'first ever' RSL book (click to expand/collapse).

Click the above image for a hi-rez PDF of the entire cover.

Also, these are some notes on the cover image:

The cover is listed in the 'Mathematical Book Covers' section in Eric Weisstein's 'MathWorld' site.

Book highlights

• all-color imagery (over 300)
• comprehensive coverage of RenderMan's functionality
• usage of RenderMan's native RIB file format and built-in shading language ("RSL") to present examples
• availability of all RenderMan example files online (under the 'Download' tab above)
• sections on global illumination and non-photoreal rendering
• use of a variety of topics from recreational mathematics to illustrate concepts
• coverage of stereo rendering (left-eye/right-eye, anaglyph, color-field stereogram and ChromaDepth[tm])

As a sampler, here is chapter 1. It is also available from Focal Press, the book's publisher.

Site contents

Here's what the tabbed menus offer:

• Home: this page (general news, a search interface and information related to the book)
• Download: materials (RIB files, shaders, maps) you can download to generate all the RenderMan-derived images in the book
• Resources: links to more RenderMan info. and related resources; help on using some of the alternative versions of RenderMan (eg. Aqsis, 3Delight, AIR, etc.)
• Reviews: what people are saying about the book
• Purchase: links to get book copies
• Feedback: my contact information, guestbook

Simple site search

Type a keyword (eg. Display, surface, Ch05, Fig_5.20 etc.) into the box below. The search is live (not from a pre-indexed database) and occurs on the entire collection of .html, .pdf, .sl, .rib and .dat files - so please be patient, it might take up to a minute to get back results.

News

This is an 'Animation Flash' newsletter announcing the book (see p. 12).

Notes on my uploading of chapter contents (RIBs, shaders, maps):

• Nov 6 '04: RIB files and shaders are online for Preface and Chapter 1
• Nov 8 '04: Working on Chapter 7 now..
• Nov 14 '04: Chapter 7 ready, starting on Chapter 6
• Nov 28 '04: Chapter 6 DONE, starting Chapter 5
• Dec 27 '04: Chapter 5 is now online, only chapters 4 and 8 remain :)
• Feb 14 '05: Chapter 4 content is online, over 80 figures! Only chapter 8 remains to be done
• Feb 26 '05: Chapter 8: content for Figs. 8.1 to 8.10 is up
• March 15 '05: Chapter 8: Figs. 8.11 through 8.15 are available..
• Oct 26 '05: Chapter 8: Figs. 8.16 to 8.20 are uploaded
• Nov 23 '05: Chapter 8: Figs. 8.54 to 8.60 (displacement shaders) are online
• Nov 25 '05: Chapter 8: Figs. 8.21-8.30 are also online
• Feb 2 '06: Chapter 8: Figs. 8.89 through 8.99 (the NPR section) is up
• Dec '06: Apologies for STILL not putting up content for the 30-or-so more figures yet..

Here is old news.

Book information

Title: Rendering for Beginners
Author: Saty Raghavachary
Publisher: Focal Press (Elsevier)
Year first published: 2004
ISBN: 0240519353
Page count: 384

Library of Congress Catalog entry:

Sales rank (12/23/06):

These are the topics covered in the book:

Additional book info

At Amazon.com you can get more information, as shown in this screen grab of the book's page:

Note - you need an Amazon account [free to set up] to use the 'Search Inside This Book' feature.

Here is a concordance [most frequently used words, alphabetized] of the top 100 words in the book, as shown at Amazon.com:


These are Amazon.com's text stats about the book:


Here is a gallery of photos showing the book at a few different locations :)

About the author

Here is a brief bio.

Site visit counter (Bpath)

Visits since Jan '05

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