Pixar's core rendering technology
Pixar’s RenderMan® Pro Server is the same software that Pixar uses to render its own feature film animation. It’s a high performance renderer built to tackle the most complicated 3D imaginable ... with production-hardened technology that is stable, reliable, and flexible. Pixar’s RenderMan® Pro Server delivers breathtaking results again and again.
Pixar develops RenderMan for production, so every version is faster and more reliable than the previous one. In fact, because Pixar uses RenderMan exclusively, the software has already been pushed to the extreme, so it's ready to render anything you can throw at it.
RenderMan is not only fast and powerful, it also possesses a wealth of sophisticated features for the creation of a vast range of styles and effects. These features of RenderMan give you all the controls you need to complete your vision, wherever it may take you.
Use RenderMan to create any look you need. From simulating traditional 2D animation to creating complex yet subtle environmental effects, RenderMan will deliver.
The ray tracing and global illumination features have been integrated with Pixar's highly evolved implementation of the REYES "scanline" rendering algorithm so that you only incur the overhead associated with these effects when and where you need them. RenderMan shader developers can selectively invoke RenderMan's ray tracing subsystem to invent new solutions to difficult production problems or to achieve physically correct illumination effects.
RenderMan lets you smoothly integrate special effects into film by accurately simulating the behavior of physical cameras. RenderMan's motion blur and depth-of-field use a patented anti-aliasing technique that blurs synthetic images so they realistically simulate their conventionally filmed counterparts. Pixar's new multi-segment motion blur even lets you approximate the nonlinear motion of objects — spinning, for example — within a single frame.
A visual graph of the Attributes and Options in Pixar's RISpec
The RISpec (RenderMan Interface Specification) consists of more than 100 attributes and options that you can call to control what's happening in your 3D scenes. The calls include camera controls, modeling transforms, quality settings, and a wide variety of rendering and display attributes. Automatically send these calls to RenderMan Pro Server from a plug-in like RenderMan Studio, create your own DSOs to generate this 3D data procedurally, or simple hack a RIB file. RenderMan offers many points in the render workflow to create and manipulate your scenes.
Pixar has developed the RISpec as a standard interface between animation software and renderers. The standard establishes a format to describe 3D data so different renderers can read the same files, such renderers are called "RenderMan compliant." Pixar's RenderMan is a powerful implementation of a renderer using this standard. Learn More
RenderMan’s Shading Language (RSL) is the key to achieving the precise visual effects you’re after ... RSL allows you to create any look you can imagine. It’s highly extensible and programmable — you can even write functions in C/C++ and link them dynamically to RenderMan. And because RenderMan’s Shading Language is procedural, it avoids the resolution and projection difficulties encountered in traditional texture mapping. It lets you create realistic effects you can’t possibly produce photographically and offers support for arbitrarily complex surface shaders, light sources, atmospheric effects, and surface displacement.
RenderMan Pro Server includes a number of utilities for working with point clouds, brick maps, shadow maps, textures, and shaders. These practical tools are able to process extremely high-resolution images and complex datasets.
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