well, i guess i'll do a basic recap on my thoughts of renderman shading language and dump some info about it..

i can honestly say, that RenderMan SL (shading language) is a very cool tool. it would probably come to us real time developers when we are trying to figure out new illum models. but IMHO that is really stupid, since probably everything we want to know about light "has been done". hehe. we are _not_ researchers.

back to renderman,
although the "global" variables are rather odd to get used to, the technical spec is really clear at it :-)
it basically just dumps a table of all the global variables.
another "plus" feature of renderman, is that there is a mini-scene graph already built.
you don't have to go and write your function to normalize anything. or check if a normal is pointing forward or backward. it already has ray tracer code, and you can set up any type of test bed.
also the fact that it can do "true displacement" with little effort is really cool.

now for the actual shading language. :|
IMHO the more you learn about the language, the more you realize the "little quirks".
i'm sure a lot of people are going to ask me about how this is when it is compared to DirectX's pixel shaders.

Well the fact of the matter is, that they are _totally_ different.
the pixel shader gives you a few instructions to do work, where as the shader language gives you complete functionality of anything.
also with RenderMan SL, it's just a "function call away", or setting the "surface" shader to this, and you get that neat surface illum model.
where as when your working with the shaders in Dx8, you have to move it to this temp register, then do this, and all this other stuff. basically the shaders with DX8 are really low-level.
imho, more low then they need to be.
 

i guess in recap, renderman for me "could" be really cool., and i'm pretty sure i could get "_very_ good at it". but, the render times are just to long. i can do what takes them 3 hours to render in 50 msc's. really, good use of a stencil buffer, about 4 passes, and i could get those results. easily.

anyways, the community is really cool, i talked with some guys that work at pixar about it (tom duff, and mark v.) had a chat with some guy at cornell about the "business". also learned about "making money" in this biz from a guy that works at sidefx. had a big talk with one of the leads that works at pixar about there hardware and how it fits into there company.
heh, i guess you can' say that was pretty good seeing that i did this stuff for about a week :-)

"third official image"
if your wondering why the teapot has those funky artifacts sticking from it,
the reason is because VC6 clamps the lines when they go up to 2048, and it clamped.