Book recommendation: Real time rendering

Rens

Some time ago I bought a book called "Real time rendering.
I've been trying to work my way through it but its taking some time. (its a 1000 pages)

I've been having a blast so far catching up on processes.
I wanted to get the title out there for anybody that is interested in the tech side of art, how engines handle basic processes/pipelines and so on.

It is very artist friendly and talks more about theory than it will dive into code and how to rewrite systems. Therefor some topics can be brief but its a good introduction for getting to know what we work with.

http://www.realtimerendering.com/

You can view the Table of Contents and some chapters here,
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Rendering-Third-Tomas-Akenine-Moller/dp/1568814240#reader_1568814240"]Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition: Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines, Naty Hoffman: 9781568814247: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]


If you have any technical books to recommend, i'd love to hear them!

ambershee

I think I have the first edition, which looks pretty differently. It's a solid book.

Rens

Yeah this is the 3rd edition, from reading comments it seems they've made a huge improvement on it.

haiddasalami

Definitely an awesome book. Borrowed it from the library and think work has it in the bookshelf somewhere. Another awesome book if you're getting into Maya scripting

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Maya-Python-Games-Film-Reference/dp/0123785782"]Maya Python for Games and Film: A Complete Reference for Maya Python and the Maya Python API: Adam Mechtley, Ryan Trowbridge: 9780123785787: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]

Kwramm

Indeed a book that every tech artist should have.

Here's some books I have in my library:
David Lanier - 3ds Max SDK (free from his website, a bit dated but a good overview of the basics)
David Gould - Complete Maya programming I & II
Vertex I & II(hopefully soon )
Ballistic's Character Modeling I - III had some interesting tutorials. Might be a bit dated by now.
Eelco Rustenberg - The Power of Scrum - super easy intro to scrum.
Sebastien St-Laurent - Shaders for Game Programming and Artists - somewhat dated, yet the best hlsl book in my library. anyone has something better?
Todd Palamar - Maya Studio Projects Dynamics - particles, dynamics and other VFX-ish stuff in Maya
Joseph Gilland - Elemental Magic - an artistic approach to VFX

Then there's some more programming books about Python, C++ and C# and SQL. I think many of them are replaceable by other good books, except for O'Reilly's "In a Nutshell" series - they're really handy to have around.

The Flying Monk

I read the realtimerendering blog from time to time. I keep forgeting that they have a book, and some sort of online learning thingy as well.

haiddasalami

Kwramm wrote: »

Eelco Rustenberg - The Power of Scrum - super easy intro to scrum.
Sebastien St-Laurent - Shaders for Game Programming and Artists - somewhat dated, yet the best hlsl book in my library. anyone has something better?

Was one of the first books I read getting into shaders. Definitely awesome though as you mentioned is now dated. The Cg Tutorial book by Nvidia is a good replacement and is free online too. There's decent amount of content though I feel that Shaders for Game Programming has more variety (post processing, lighting models, excercises etc) though the CG tutorial gives a nice background into the pipeline. Btw hows the books by David Gould?

Kwramm

Pretty good. Part I is an intro to how Maya works behind the scenes. I used this together with Chad Vernon's page - I found they complement each other. Part 2 seems to have some handy math tutorials, but if you're already familiar with vectors, rotations, etc. then you could skip this. I haven't really read much of part 2 yet though.