This document provides general information about writing shaders in the RenderMan Shading Language and using the two most commonly available RenderMan renderers:

• Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRMan); and
• Larry Gritz's Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT)

If you have comments, questions or suggestions about RManNotes, send mail to the author, Steve May, at smay@pixar.com.

• Writing RenderMan Shaders
  a general shader-writing approach
  • Regular Patterns
    procedurally generated regular patterns
  • Stochastic Patterns
    procedurally generated irregular patterns
  • rmannotes.sl
    source file for RManNotes shading functions
• Shader Basics
  shader source and object files, how shaders work, and how to compile shaders
• RSL Emacs Mode
  compiling and testing shaders with Emacs
• PRMan Configuration
  understanding configuration files, specifying search paths for shaders and texutres, and changing the default image file format.
• Miscellaneous Stuff
  the differences between BMRT and PRMan, shading language limitations, and the location of shaders and texture files at ACCAD
• Search the RManNotes!
  use this to search the notes by keyword
• What's New?
• For your convenience, you can now download the entire RManNotes as one compressed archive. Choose either RManNotes.tar.Z or RManNotes.tar.gz or RManNotes.zip or (all about ~1M).

• Digital Lighting
• Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach
  a fine book edited by my friend Dave
• RenderMan Repository (RMR)
  shaders and other related stuff
• AL
  a procedural animation language which interfaces to RenderMan renderers

The RenderMan (R) Interface Procedures and RIB Protocol are:
Copyright 1988, 1989, Pixar. All rights reserved.
RenderMan (R) is a registered trademark of Pixar.

Blue Moon Rendering Tools are:
(c) Copyright 1990-1995 by Larry I. Gritz. All rights reserved.

Last Modified: 6/11/96