RND111 – Introduction to RenderMan by Liam Whitehouse

Liam Whitehouse walks you through lighting and rendering a photoreal rainforest using Pixar’s RenderMan and Maya. You get real production files, real shots, and a straight look at how lighting actually works for dense environments.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Lighting photoreal environments with RenderMan
• Texture colour correction for consistent renders
• Working with displacement maps for foliage and bark
• Setting up Light Path Expression AOVs for compositing
• Rendering for VR

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic familiarity with Maya and general rendering concepts
• Tools: Maya, RenderMan
• Hardware: Multi-core CPU with 16GB+ RAM, 40GB free disk space for 30GB source files

📝 Description

This one picks up where Liam’s last course left off. No theory dump — you jump straight into a heavy rainforest scene and figure out how to make it hold up under final lighting. You will deal with dense geometry, texture colour correction, and getting clean light through a ton of leaves without killing your render times.

Liam breaks down the stuff that actually matters in production. How displacement maps add detail without bloating your scene. How to set up Light Path Expression AOVs so you have real control later in comp. And how to keep your lighting flexible when the art director wants changes at the last minute.

You also get a solid look at rendering for VR, which has its own set of headaches with stereo, resolution, and performance. Plus you get over 30GB of source images, renders, and models to pull apart. Members can also follow along via the fxphd VPN with full versions of Maya and RenderMan.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Lighters and generalists who want practical RenderMan experience
• Maya users looking to add photoreal environment lighting to their reel

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Liam Whitehouse is a returning fxphd instructor with a background in lighting and rendering for production. He teaches RenderMan the way it is used on real shots, not just sliders and defaults. His courses focus on building portfolio work you can actually show.

🏁 Final Result

• A lit and rendered photoreal rainforest shot built in Maya and RenderMan, including AOVs and a VR-ready version for your reel.