Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great overview of the Renderman specs
Comment: The book covers everything from the basics of setting up a scene with lighting to writing your own shaders with detailed descriptions of the Renderman API. Overall, excellent overview for the intermediate graphics prefessional.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Delivers more than the title suggests
Comment: The world of computer graphics books is filled with fat, pricy tomes that are frankly little better than rehashes of the manual. "Advanced Renderman" is a completely different sort of book.While Renderman is the ostensible subject, the authors actually cover the entire graphics workflow-- and explain the "why" of it all. Their section on anti-aliasing, for example, is concise, complete, and makes clear the implications of all those little doo-hickeys in 3DS -- you remember the AR explanation better, because its based around how rendering works, rather than how a particular application works (which may change in the next rev, anyway)
Smart guys, smart book-- highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great all-around RenderMan reference
Comment: This is a great book, written in clear and understandable English. It proivded me (a novice) great information about the RenderMan interface. Not only did it provide a reference to the various API calls, but it also includes an introduction to the basic maths behind it, as well as chapters that discuss CG in general. A thoroughly well written, useful and informative book. It is indespensible for any RenderMan user and in fact, for any CG artist.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Art of Photosurrealism
Comment: This book is written by six renowned professionals in digital lighting field. Even you are not a shader programmer, chaper 1 and 13 show the aesthic architecture of lighting composition and tell us the beauty of 'Photosurrealism'. The depth of each paper is just amazing and you can find more beautiful tecnical information from other papers written by the same authors.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent compilation!
Comment: This book far exceeds both The Renderman Companiona and Texturing and Modeling: A procedural approach(Two very good books) in the presentation of massive amounts of information, as well as simplicity of presentation. While this book does sort of deal more with BMRT and PRMan(look at the authors, sheesh...) than the Interface, per se, it does a very nice job of presenting information specifically geared towards them. The inclusion of a section on mathmatics and physics is especially appealing for me, because I'm not yet out of high school. Anyway, if you aren't too much of a miser, buy this book.Oh, and since these reviews are not supposed to reveal cruical plot elements: There IS a self shading cloud shader!
