after hacking at it all night long i feel *somewhat confident*  that i have a decent foundation in the *language.
i put the order in for the book written by larry gatz, hopefully i will learn a bunch from that.

this is the second so called "official" image i made with BMRT. absolutely amazing.
the teapot has a "true displacement map", where it isn't' a stupid normal hack, but it actually perturbs the edges/vertices.
this is apparent by looking at the shadows and the silhouette edges.

the teapot surface is the shiny shader, the left wall is really interesting because i made it so it had no roughness (which is VERY rare in real life) :)
gives some interesting appearance.

i will leave the emissive values for you to guess.
btw, color bleeding is just amazing.

*render man spec is somewhere at pixar's site