“RenderMan was something you could do rendering with that was programmable,” he said.Pixar Animation Studios (/ˈpɪksɑːr/), commonly known as just Pixar, is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films.
Renderers were complicated when RenderMan was first published, said WETA VFX supervisor Joe Letteri, who earned Oscars for the second and third “Lord of the Rings” films as well as for “King Kong.” If you compare ‘Jurassic Park’ with the earlier dinosaur stop-motion movies, where the dinosaurs would judder around when they were moving quickly, that lost the sense of reality.” Said Edlund: “What was so great about ‘Jurassic Park’ was that the dinosaurs had motion blur, so they looked natural. Effects were moving into a new era - the era of computer graphics.”
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When that movie came out, it was like a huge awakening in the industry. Whatever resistance there was to this new direction essentially changed. “Two years later, ‘Jurassic Park’ came out. “That got a lot of people moving down the road of using RenderMan and computer graphics in making films. ” ‘Terminator 2’ made a lot of money and used RenderMan,” Catmull said. He said two films marked turns in the road for the software: 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and 1993’s “Jurassic Park.” “By letting ILM, Digital Domain and other studios have input, we had this incredible breadth of really high-end, artistically demanding people who were requiring more and more complex images,” Catmull said. (Pixar originally was a division of Lucasfilm before it was bought by Steve Jobs.) We decided that while we were leaders in animation - we were working on ‘Toy Story’ at the time - we were going to sell a commercial product, and we would let the studios drive the direction of where RenderMan went.”Ī key early customer was Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light + Magic. He added: “Then we made a decision which proved to be an important one.
“Also, we need a mechanism for the artist to be able to control the look and the lighting.” “In order to fit into live action, we needed to solve the problem of motion blur (the streaking of a moving object),” he said.
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“It enabled many movies to be made, so it was a tremendously important development,” said VFX veteran Richard Edlund, chair of the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards Committee whose honors include four Oscars for VFX and three Scientific and Engineering Awards.Ĭatmull said there were several key drivers in RenderMan’s development.
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It was the first Oscar awarded for a software package. In March 2001, Catmull, Carpenter and Cook received an Academy Award of Merit - an Oscar statuette - for the advancements in motion picture rendering exemplified in RenderMan. Rendering is the process of calculating the information in a CG file for final video output - essentially turning numbers into images. RenderMan has contributed to all of Pixar’s CG feature titles as well as to countless additional animated and VFX-driven films, including “The Abyss,” “Jurassic Park,” “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Many have worked to advance the application during the past 20 years. “Special effects were done practically or with models.” “At that time, CG was nowhere in the special effects business,” said Catmull, who will be the featured speaker today at Siggraph, the computer graphics confab, where the newest version of RenderMan will be unveiled.
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