At any one moment you can choose from probably 10 renderers - there are many out there for people to choose. And the NVIDIA graphics cards are another take on this. In the long run, RenderMan probably isn't the largest money-making renderer. We don't get sucked into real-time game visualization or architectural visualization or lots of many other interesting problems. It's been a very clear focus." (This single-mindedness is one of the reasons that the Motion Picture Academy awarded an Oscar statuette for RenderMan, a rare achievement in the history of AMPAS' Scientific and Technical Awards.)ĭana Batali, director of RenderMan Product Development observes, "Ed Catmull has led RenderMan development to focus on one problem - film-quality photorealistic rendering. "We're making something that's completely tuned for the film industry. "In trying to serve the film community, we've always had the philosophy that we're not making a consumer product," stresses Catmull. You basically have to say it's more important to build connections than try to hold on to a secret. It was embarrassing, but it helped prove the fact that there's a community out there." For the RenderMan Group to build and maintain healthy relationships within that film community, Catmull believes, "You have to let go of immediate gratification. There was one time (a software feature called Deep Shadows) when we did hold something back and we soon realized that we'd made a huge mistake. "Pixar didn't get things before anybody else, which a lot of people found puzzling because they thought we'd take advantage of things before we made them available to other people. "The RenderMan Group, which has been led for many years by Dana Batali, has had a philosophy that they would treat outside people - like ILM and WETA and Sony - the same as Pixar's internal group." He adds wryly, "Being in Seattle probably helped protect the RenderMan people from being grabbed for 'local emergencies' at Pixar. ' They push us forward."Ĭatmull notes that the RenderMan Group, which is based in Seattle, Washington, and not at Pixar Animation Studios' headquarters in Emeryville, California, pursues an independent approach to dealing with outside customers. We ended up with the situation where companies like ILM and Sony come in and say 'We need this. "The impossible goals that we put in front of ourselves were far exceeded, but they were exceeded by the other people who kept on adding to it and changing it. But the place that we've gone to from that initial start is miles ahead of even what we conceived at the time."Ĭatmull is quick to lavish credit for this on other studios that have used RenderMan over the years. The embarrassing thing - and it's kind of hard to describe - is that a lot of credit was given to us for the time that we spent getting it started, which of course had its value. We solved some problems and set down a path that enabled RenderMan. The positive thing is that a long time ago we set some impossible goals for ourselves. "When I realized it's been 20 years, I thought 'Has it really been twenty?' There's a positive thing, and also something that's kind of embarrassing. E, studio co-founder and President Ed Catmull delivered a candid assessment of Pixar's history to an SRO SIGGRAPH crowd, and the company is unveiling the latest version of its software, RenderMan 14.0.Ĭatmull expresses some amazement as he ponders the evolution of a tool whose development was launched when he led the computer graphics department at Lucasfilm back in the 1980s.This anniversary arrives in a year when Pixar is riding high with its latest hit movie, WALL A major milestone being marked at SIGGRAPH '08 is the 20th anniversary of Pixar's RenderMan software system, which has been used to render the digital graphics in 44 of the last 47 films nominated for an Academy Award for Visual Effects.
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