• DOI:10.1145/1185657.1185817
• Corpus ID: 34496605

A brief introduction to RenderMan

@article{Raghavachary2006ABI,
  title={A brief introduction to RenderMan},
  author={Saty Raghavachary},
  journal={ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Courses},
  year={2006}
}

• Saty Raghavachary
• Published 30 July 2006
• Art
• ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Courses

Pixar's RenderMan software has its origins in the University of Utah during the 1970s, where Pixar founder Ed Catmull did his PhD work on rendering problems. From there, the scene shifted to George Lucas' Lucasfilm in California, where Catmull and few other graphics researchers were brought in to work on graphics software specifically for use in motion pictures (a part of Lucasfilm later became Pixar).The researchers had the explicit goal of being able to create complex, high quality photorealistic imagery, which were by definition virtually indistinguishable from filmed live action images. They began to create a renderer to help them achieve this audacious goal. The renderer had an innovative architecture designed from scratch, incorporating technical knowledge gained from past research both at Utah and NYIT. Loren Carpenter implemented core pieces of the rendering system, and Rob Cook wrote the shading subsystem. Pat Hanrahan served as the lead architect for the entire project. The rendering algorithm was termed "REYES", a name with dual origins. It was inspired by Point Reyes, a picturesque spot on the California coastline which Carpenter loved to visit. To the rendering team the name was also an acronym for "Render Everything You Ever Saw", a convenient phrase to sum up their ambitious undertaking.At the 1987 SIGGRAPH conference, Cook, Carpenter and Catmull presented a paper called "The Reyes Rendering Architecture" which explained how the renderer functioned. Later at the SIGGRAPH in 1990, the shading language was presented in a paper titled "A Language for Shading and Lighting Calculations" by Hanrahan and Jim Lawson. In 1989 the software came to be known as RenderMan and began to be licensed to CG visual effects and animation companies. Also, the CG division of Lucasfilm was spun off into its own company, Pixar in 1983 and was purchased by Steve Jobs in 1986. The rest, as they say, is history..Even though the public offering of RenderMan did not happen until 1989, the software was used internally at Lucasfilm/Pixar way before that, to create movie visual effects, animation shorts and television commercials.In 1982, the Genesis Effect in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was created using an early version of RenderMan, as was the stained glass knight in the movie Young Sherlock Holmes released in 1985.Today, leading animation and visual effects studios around the world routinely use Pixar's RenderMan thanks to its unsurpassed track record - it is fast, stable, efficient when it comes to handling large scenes with complex geometry, surface appearances and lighting. The output is high quality photoreal imagery, usable on its own (eg. in animated features) or ready for compositing with existing footage (eg. in live-action movies).