The RenderMan companion

What Hacker News says

1. gdubsSep 2023
   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 trips to the mall with my parents and negotiating the purchase of another hefty computer book.
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2. reactivenzMar 2023
   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.
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3. joshuakJul 2015
   I started working with RenderMan in 1988/89. If you're a programmer then I think the RIB interface is even easier then using GUI tools like Blender. It can be very fun to play with directly. Feed the following text into `prman`.

     Display "hacker news" "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 how rotations are in degrees, and commands are easily human readable. The interface was designed to be useable by people as easily as by software ("WorldBegin", cute and intuitive). Key things to remember when playing around with the RIB interface:

   It's a 'right handed' coordinate system, so use your right hand to model the axis (perpendicular index finder, thumb, and middle finder form the axis). Put your thumb along the positive axis to visualize things like rotation. Above I use a negative 1 x axis (vector) to rotate 120 degrees so I can visualize the direction of rotation by pointing my right thumb to the right (negative x axis), and the direction my fingers curl is the direction of rotation.

   The transformation hierarchy makes it easy to control and reason about transformations without resorting to matrix math. Use that to create easy to manipulate groups. The relevant commands are:

     # parent object
     TransformBegin
       Translate x y z
       Rotate angle x_axis y_axis z_axis
       Scale x y z
       Skew angle dx1 dy1 dz1 dx2 dy2 dz2
       # child object
       TransformBegin
         # Translate x y z...
         # ... invoke geometry
       TransformEnd
     TransformEnd
   
   

   1: http://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/rispec_pdf/RISpec...
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4. virtualritzMar 2026
   > Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.

   Are they? A lot of these were used by people >20 years before Inigo wrote his blog posts. I wrote RenderMan shaders for VFX in the 90's professionally; you think about the problem, you "discover" (?) the math.

   So they were known because they were known (a lot of them are also trivial).

   Inio's main credit is for cataloging them, especially the 3D ones, and making this knowledge available in one place, excellently presented.

   And of course, Shadertoy and the community and giving this knowledge a stage to play out in that way. I would say no one deserves more credit for getting people hooked on shader writing and proceduralism in rendering than this man.

   But I would not feel bad about the math being 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 (what we call 2D SDFs today) beause of the REYES architecture of the renderers.

   But knowledge about using SDFs in shaders mostly lived in people's heads. Whoever would write about it online would thus get quoted by an LLM.

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5. pjmlpJun 2021
   The only time I 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 to see how much Renderman has moved beyond that, and the evolution of programmable GPGPU as well.

   https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Steve-Upstill/dp/0201508680

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6. pjmlpSep 2019
   OpenGL would have been better if that role had been taken by Iris Inventor.[0]

   Instead it became a rite of passage for every OpenGL beginner to reimplement Inventor on their own way, either from scratch or playing Tetris with different 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.

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