Mcronin Posted July 20, 2004 Share Posted July 20, 2004 Just wondering which of the Renderman books would be the best one for a beginner.I guess the best one for a beginner would be the Essential RenderMan Fast ? Cheers Starkhorn Essential Renderman Fast is a good place to start. It's a quick read and it gives you a good "Renderman in a Nutshell" type of overview. It covers all the main aspects of Renderman without digging too deep. Once you've read it you should have a better understanding of VOPs. I'd really recommend that you try your hand at programming, though. Renderman and VOPs make a whole lot more sense if you have a grasp of some programming language. C for Dummies Volume 1 and 2 are a great way to get this information if you don't feel technically minded. I know lots of people think the Dummies books are crap and you can't really learn anything from them... that's true in a lot of cases, but C for Dummies does a really good job of explaining general programming concepts to people who have no experience and think they aren't capable of learning this stuff. The drawback is that CFD is full of alot of filler and nonsense but it all helps drive the point home. If you want something a bit more no-nonsense, try C++ From the Ground Up or C++: How to Program. Don't let the programming stuff scare you. You don't need to learn to be an ace programmer, you just need to understand programming concepts, and it's really not that hard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
starkhorn Posted July 20, 2004 Share Posted July 20, 2004 I come from a computer science background (HP-UX admin with experience in shell, awk, and perl scripting...and some in C, C++ and Pascal), so programming doesn't bother me and I actually prefer to know what's going on at times. Basically I'm one of these computer science geeks who thought that 3d graphics was easy and that I'd pick it up in no time.....well guess what ? .....it ain't that easy after all....more art than computer science. Yes the math part in the texture and modeling, a procedure approach is a little heavy and I'm getting slight head-aches at the moment. But from what I can figure out at present, I can take the code and principles from the books, convert them to vmantra/houdini via the VOP network ? Am I way off on that one ? I'm re-watching the VOP vids from side effects again so hopefully it will start to make more sense and can show me where I can use the Renderman books and the "Texturing and Modeling, a procedure approach" book. Sounds like the Renderman Fast book is the good one to start with and then moving onto Advanced Renderman once I get good at the Renderman syntax. Thanks for your help. Cheers Starkhorn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark Posted July 20, 2004 Share Posted July 20, 2004 hi, i did exactly that as an exercise, converted a prman shader to VOPS. i found it very useful. see this thread mango shader the original shader was from a siggraph paper, send me your email address if you want it. (damn PDF is locked so i cant copy and paste the prman shader code). i assume the siggraph papers aren't copyrighted... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baq Posted July 27, 2004 Author Share Posted July 27, 2004 Thanks for everyone for answers and advices. After spending with Houdini some time, I think something about month, I know this app little better and can finally say - NO MORE MAYA!!! Actually I uninstalled all my Maya's PLEs and I stick with Houdini. What I can say more? I like Houdini community much more than any other and I feel like in family Greetz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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