Today I’ll be examining five books that I’ve found most useful in increasing my skills as a renderer artist. If you’re new here, I’m an industrial designer turned 3D artist who enjoys helping others improve their rendering talents when I can.
I discovered five books that have helped me establish a solid foundation of knowledge that removes the majority of the guessing from utilizing rendering tools. This is important because it frees me up to focus on things like storyline, composition, mood, and lighting rather than technical minutiae.
1. Light for Visual Artists second edition
Light for Visual Artists, Second Edition is the title of the first book. This is the first book I recommend to anyone who is just starting out with rendering and wants to enhance their renderings right away. This book is well-written, easy to read, and packed with photographs and illustrations that serve as excellent visual aids.
This book is developed with artists in mind, and it explains how light is utilized to tell stories, evoke emotion, and act. The purpose of this book is for you to be able to use light fast and intuitively to produce stronger works of art.
This is critical for any 3D artist. KeyShot is the rendering software I use the most. It employs physically accurate lighting and provides image-based as well as physical light support. After reading and comprehending this book, producing the lighting effects you picture in your imagination is simple in a tool like KeyShot.
As you can see from the graph at the bottom of this page, it’s not complicated, it focuses solely on light, and it doesn’t delve too deeply into each principle, keeping it from being too long to read. It’s highly relevant to rendering and reasonably priced, thus I rate it a 4 out of 5 for good value. Highly recommended.
2. Digital Lighting and Rendering
Digital Lighting and Rendering is the title of the second book. This is the second book I recommend to anyone interested in learning how to render.
This book is now five years old, which implies a new version is likely, but I found it to be still current and beneficial. Unlike the previous book, this one is entirely about rendering and is both incredibly relevant and exhaustive. If you can only buy one book from this list, make it this one.
The techniques and procedures covered in this book are more traditional and will be most known to users of applications such as 3D Studio Max or Blender, although the same principles apply to other tools as well. This book is more thorough and intricate than the previous one, and it has more than double the page count.
Overall, I believe this book provides excellent value, and I purchased my copy used to save money. While we’re on the subject of this book.
3. Digital Modeling First Edition
I have similar feelings about this book as I do about the one mentioned above, except that it is all about 3D modeling. Why include a modeling book? Because your rendering will appear bad if you don’t have a good model. This book is a little out of date and concentrates on classic polygon-based modeling.
Having said that, it’s a good companion book to this list, and I believe it’s a worthy recommendation. If you only use CAD (rather than polygonal modeling), you should probably avoid this book because it won’t be as useful to you.
4. Light: Science and Magic Fifth Edition
Light: Science and Magic, Fifth Edition is the fourth book on this list. Here’s another book about lighting. Light is a difficult subject that can be written about in a variety of ways depending on the audience. This is a book about light written by and for photographers. Why would I suggest a photography book to an artist looking to improve their rendering skills?
Consider your rendering program to be a digital camera that is rendering the digital image or photo you are making. When many render artists want to attain realism, mimicking photography is a terrific approach to get there. The same principles that govern an excellent photograph apply to a fantastic depiction.
This book differs from the previous on our list in that it delves considerably further into the topics. It focuses on actual lights, lenses, and photography equipment, much of which may be recreated in 3D rendering software. As I recall, this book isn’t the best-written, with numerous grammatical and editing issues, which is strange given that it’s the fifth edition. If you can get over this problem, I believe you’ll get a lot out of this book.
5. Real-Time Rendering fourth edition
Finally, the fifth book. The rendering manual. This is the book I mentioned in a video a while back, and I had a lot of direct messages and comments asking what book I was referring to. I give you Real-time Rendering Fourth Edition, which has a massive 1049 pages. The bibliography and index are around 300 pages long in this book. It’s a beast.
I’m not going to pretend to be any smarter than I am. A lot of this material is beyond my comprehension. It’s a textbook for individuals who want to create rendering programs. I have to skip over a lot of physics and programming documentation. The book is around 4 inches thick, with small text on super-thin bible paper. Not to mention how pricey the book is. So, why would I ever endorse it?
So far as I know, it is the most comprehensive book on the subject. The most recent version was also released in 2018, thus it is up to date with the majority of the most recent data and technologies. When I can’t find an answer online, I resort to this book.
It includes visual aids and graphics that can help illustrate a theory or principle. However, the actual print quality of the photographs is quite poor, which is regrettable. Given the price of this book, I would have expected higher-quality printing and paper. I’d rather spend more money on a high-quality book than a lot of money on a low-quality one.
That being said, this book is a treasure of information and highly useful, and I am pleased to have it in my book collection. I’ll open it up and read a few pages just to get away from work.