Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25 | Hacker News Reader

Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25

fxguide.com

92 pointsorenjacob12 comments

It still kills me a little inside when I think of the day I helped Ed Catmull load a Pixar box onto a bus to the airport knowing I was going to turn them down on their job offer to go to work at Silicon Graphics instead.

Pixar just didn't feel stable enough and I had a wife and newborn. Sure enough, I was a hardware guy, and Pixar dumped hardware two weeks after the date I would have started and I would have been out of a job.

That's too bad. I would have been thrilled to work there.

Do you see any opportunity for Pixar to get back into hardware?

You should probably go back and study why Silicon Graphics, Sun, and the other workstation vendors no longer exist.

Apple is now the only successful Unix workstation vendor.

Yeah. Too bad that IBM company went under.

SGI no longer exists? That would be big news to their many employees.

Why did it seem unstable? I didn't get that impression from Apodaca's book: Advanced Renderman. Seemed like a really cool place with a bit of shuffling between Lucas and Jobs later. I always wondered why Pat Hanrahan wasn't more prominent in Pixar... then I looked him up. I haven't realized he co-founded Tableau.

I got into Renderman in the late nineties thanks to Larry Gritz's Renderman compliant renderer BMRT, which was free for non-commercial use. I believe it was used for a number of Hollywood productions alongside PRMan, since it could raytrace and do global illumination.

At that time I was working in a supermarket and running a 16meg p166. Quite a distance from the world of high end graphics!

I created models in a beta version of Rhino I got from a Computer Arts coverdisk, which I exported in Renderman's text based RIB format. I would then hand edit these files to add shaders I had written. Back then I was convinced that shaders were the future, and that they would eventually make their way into games.

I ended up using it to create artwork for some early mobile games I released back in 2003. (http://richardjdare.com/blog/games/) - I would love to get back into hacking on Renderman again...

You still can, 3Delight is a REYES and raytracer and is free for dual core use. http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php

I learned a lot from BMRT 'back in the day' until I got full time access to a PRMan license for myself. Shame about how it turned out for both BMRT and later Exluna with that patent squabble with Pixar. Nvidia bought Exluna (spiritual successor to BMRT) and hushed Pixar down, briefly turned it into Gelato product and that's the last I've heard about it.

I even wrote a brief starting tutorial into RSL about 12 years ago here: http://www.vga.hr/resources/tutorials/3d/rsl/index.htm It's still up since it still get lots of visits (mainly from wikipedia these days). It was intended for my co-workers at the time but it gained quite a popularity with studios around the world for some reason back then. I take pride in the fact that there are still sources up for PRMan, BMRT and Exluna Entropy up there. :)

The RenderMan Companion was my first programming book. My parents bought it for me at the Barnes and Noble bookstore where we used to go on Saturdays (this was pre-internet days for us; AOL was just arriving and would be a long-distance call for another couple of years.)

I was too young at the time to really understand the C listings in the book, but I re-read it about a dozen times and a well-worn copy sits behind me on my shelf as I'm typing this.

The thing that did stand out, that Upstill really communicated, was the concept of an API, and why standards are valuable.

Anyway, RenderMan is without a doubt the single reason I became a programmer.

Great article. Despite thinking I knew a lot about Pixar's life and times, for me the surprises were:

* Pixar pioneered ray-tracing, but it just wasn't fast enough for production use.

* The Pixar hardware (a) started out as a frame store (not a 3d workstation), (b) was based on transputers, and (c) renderman was named after hardware (i.e. like a Discman or Walkman).

* Luxo Jr. was not created with Renderman -- Tin Toy was the first Renderman film.

Nice to see INMOS mentioned. Loved learning to program on those little transputers.

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