Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
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Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
1–10 of 13 posts
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#2It 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.
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#3It 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…
Do you see any opportunity for Pixar to get back into hardware?
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#4Nice to see INMOS mentioned. Loved learning to program on those little transputers.
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#5I 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...
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#6It 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…
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.
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#7Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#8It 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…
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.
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#9I 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…
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. :)
Re: Pixar’s RenderMan turns 25
#10Great 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.