We kind of rendered photorealistic scenes by making certain assumptions and basing it essentially on how the camera sees the scene, and calculating by each scanline what it is the camera would see for each pixel. To put a fine word on it, it’s kind of a cheat. Technically, these techniques were sometimes called biased methods. Traditionally, rendering used what is known as scanline-based techniques. Achieving PhotorealismĪctually within the past couple of years there’s been a mini revolution in rendering. So that’s our focus, photorealistic imagery for the movie theatre in such a way that the audience is totally fooled and they can’t tell what is real and what is not. ![]() But, RenderMan is a photoreal renderer and in visual effects photorealism is exactly what it’s about. The Incredibles looked very comic book cartoony, Ratatouille had a french impressionistic painting look, Brave had a very green landscape, and Cars had a Southwestern landscape. It’s the visual style and look of the movie. In a modern feature of animation, especially visual effects, you may have like 20, 30, or 50 layers of imagery all composited together: live-action, computer graphics, mattes, and other various components.Īll Pixar movies have a certain look which like an abstracted realism. We’re talking about extreme levels of photorealism here. Sometimes it’s nicknamed “PR RenderMan” for “Photo Real RenderMan” and our mission is simply to make images look great on a movie screen that’s 50 feet across. It’s both a very successful and creative studio that produces amazing animated feature films, but it’s also a studio that’s responsible for much of the key technologies that are used in the modern visual effects and animation industries. That’s the part of Pixar that most people are not aware of, but is actually a fundamental part of what Pixar is. In fact, RenderMan has been responsible for 19 out of the last 21 winners of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. So when you look at various landmark movies such as Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Avengers, or various Pixar movies, all of them use RenderMan to generate the photoreal images you see. Since then, RenderMan has essentially been behind much of the modern revolution in visual effects in producing photoreal imagery. That was the first movie which really had fully CG-rendered dinosaurs, but they were good enough to be combined with live-action in a way that was believable. In fact, when Toy Story was released, it was right around the same time another landmark movie was released which was Jurassic Park. However, that basic technology core in Pixar, especially in the area of rendering, has always remained and we’ve always shared that technology with the rest of the industry. It was only in the early 1990s that Pixar started working on the first fully CG animated feature film, which of course became Toy Story, and since then has become best known as a feature film animation studio and indeed, that’s what we really are. RenderMan actually goes back to the origins of Pixar when in 1986 Steve Jobs purchased what was then the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm and turned it into a company called Pixar. Pixar was originally focused on selling hardware and software to process, what then in the 1980s was high-level computer graphics and obviously pretty primitive in today’s standards. Also, seeing new methods of achieving a certain type of effect or result is definitely very stimulating. How you get around problems and solve them is the most fascinating part of this business. ![]() The common thread for all of these is that I’ve become very interested in all the tools and how you do things. Now I’ve been at Pixar for the past 10 years. I joined AutoDesk for a period of time and I was responsible for 3D products such as 3ds Max. I was the Product Manager for Maya from version 1. ![]() I was actually on the original team that developed Maya way back in the beginning. ![]() For me, how to get there gave me the most satisfaction. What they produce is what gives them job satisfaction. Most people are working in a creative role because they are creatives. I worked in production for a period of time, but I actually reached a point in my career where I realized that the means were actually more interesting, stimulating, and fulfilling than the ends. My first college degree was in graphic design and then I did computer science. My name is Chris Ford, I’m the Business Director for RenderMan.
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