Essential Guide to RenderMan® Shading Plugin Development: Understanding Bxdfs

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

B. E. HollisterEssential Guide to RenderMan® Shading Plugin Developmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9392-8_2

2. What RenderMan Plugins Are Made Of: C++ Language and Shared Object Files

Brad E. Hollister¹  

(1)

Carson, CA, USA

 

This chapter’s goal is to introduce the reader to the programming language of shading plugins. The reader is shown how to build plugins for the RenderMan server and where plugins are loaded from.¹

The C++ Language

Before we can delve into Bxdf plugin examples, we need to cover some preliminaries about the C++ language, as RenderMan shader plugins are written in C++ (and not like RSL,² which was its own distinct programming language). ...