The RenderMan companion
by Steve Upstill · first published 1990
7mentions
3recommended by
5HN commenters
2013–2026first – last mentioned
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…"framebuffer" "rgba" Projection "perspective" "fov" [45] Translate 0 0 10 WorldBegin Translate 0 -1 0 Rotate 120 -1 0 0 Geometry "teapot" WorldEnd Then check out the Steve Upstill book "The Renderman Companion", "Advanced RenderMan" by Tony Apodaca and Larry Gritz, and the spec[1] for reference. You can learn a lot of creative skills, geometry, animation, math, and technology from this simple interface. Note…
on “Intro to RenderMan for Blender” ↗Yes, classic book where from 90's like "The Renderman Companion" or "Advanced RenderMan", and then there is toolings books, for each tool. I used to own many Maya books and 3DS Max books.
on “DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code” ↗I have such nostalgia for that particular moment in time, and for me it was the Renderman Companion and Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. The web was still small, and the information density contained in Borders Books or Barnes & Nobel was just completely immersive. Lots of snowy Saturday…
on “Black Art of 3D Game Programming (1995)” ↗…kinds of libraries. Meanwhile, other graphical SDKs always provided such APIs. By the way, the best 3D API back then was Renderman, the genesis for modern shading languages. https://www.amazon.com/RenderMan-Companion-Programmers-Reali... [0] Yes there was Open Inventor afterwards, but its story is a bit convoluted.
on “Famous Graphics Chips: Microsoft’s Talisman” ↗…had access to Renderman documentation was during my thesis, porting a particle based visualization engine from Objective-C/NeXT Cube into a plain Windows/OpenGL 1.1/MFC. Reading that, alongside "The Renderman Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics" was eye opening how far behind regular PCs were from such graphical workstations. Naturally that was about 20 something years ago, very interessing…
on “Pixar RenderMan 24 with XPU Hybrid Rendering” ↗The RenderMan Companion was my first programming book. My parents bought it for me at the Barnes and Noble bookstore where we used to go on Saturdays (this was pre-internet days for us; AOL was just arriving and would be a long-distance…
on “Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25” ↗…regurgiated by an LLM. There were very few people writing shaders (mostly for VFX, in RenderMan SL) in the 90's and after. So apart from the "Texturing and Modeling -- A Procedural Approach" book, the "The RenderMan Companion" and "Advanced RenderMan", there was no literature. The GPU Gems series closed some gaps in later years. The RenderMan Repository website was what had shader source and all pattern stuff was implict…
on “Coding Agents Could Make Free Software Matter Again” ↗