New to the CG world needing help with "Shaders"

[Prentice]

Evening all,

Studying VFX at Media Design School (New Zealand) this year (only teaching me the basics), I have many questions unanswered.

I see alot of people mentioning that they have "writen" they're own shaders.

I take it this means that they are not using the default "blinn", "phong", or "lambert" shaders provided by maya? (not sure about other 3d packages).

Would someone please oh please enlighten me, and perhaps point me in the right direction in where to find tutorials on making custom shaders or downloading shaders or what on earth ever...

I welcome any suggestions. Thanks a million.

[DeadlyFreeze]

Blinn, phong and all that are just how specular highlights are displayed on a object, they arnt shaders themselves.

I don’t know if you can write shaders for maya default render but I know you can with Mentalray. As far as writing your own goes, you need to know C++ pretty well. I cant say much beyond that, resources for maya seem to be null.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/shaders/

you can find lots of shaders there....
if you want to find about Maya....then "Gnomon Online" is the place to go
http://www.gnomononline.com/

[Prentice]

I was afraid of having to pay for decent teaching

I've got a few Gnomon dvd's on the way now.

Cheers for the help.

[eeek]

Go to this site:

http://www.rendermanacademy.com/ - it will teach you the basics and some very complex shader lib stuff. That you should be able to pass onto MR.

Also there a connector to RM from max called maxman. And theres alot of RM compliant renders out there. Aquis, Turtle, BMRT(blue moon rendering tools) with visual shader editors and of course renderman.

Theres also a script for max called "doberman" which imports .rib format.

Price is $2000, for artist tools including (mtor,slim,alfred and it) I wish i have time to learn it!

eek