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Everything you ever saw: Pixar's Ed Catmull looks back on 20 years of RenderMan.(Trends & Technology)(Interview)
Twenty years ago, Pixar Animation Studios released a shading language, an interface, and a specification called RenderMan, a collection of "took and systems that would let thousands of people create pictures of whatever they chose to design, "as Pixar's Ed Catmull put it then. And indeed, studios around the world have used RenderMan to create hundreds of films, many of which have won Oscars for visual effects and for animation.
In 1993, Catmull, Loren Carpenter, Rob Cook, Thomas Porter Pat Hanrahan, Anthony A. Apodaca, and Darwyn Peachey received a scientific and engineering award from the Academy for the development of RenderMan software. In 2001, Catmull, Cook, and Carpenter received an Academy Award of Merit for "significant advancements to the field of motion-picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan." Catmull has also received Academy Awards for subdivision surfaces and digital image compositing.
This month, at the Scientific and Technical Awards presentations, the Academy is bestowing its Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an Oscar statuette, to "Ed Catmull, a computer scientist, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, for his lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion-picture industry." Below, Catmull discusses the evolution of RenderMan and its impact on the CG industry.
What was the original goal for RenderMan?
We wanted to do something that was going to last for many years, so we had, let's say, three main goals. One of them was to think about extreme complexity. We set a goal of being able to manage 80 million polygons, which at that time was extremely ridiculous, but we were trying to think about the problem in a different way. That forced us to redo the way we thought about the whole pipeline, which has led to an architecture that has lasted for years. Second, we believed we had to find a solution to motion blur. And the third goal was to come up with control over shading and lighting so it didn't have to be done by programmers.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
How did you solve motion blur?
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