RenderMan Pro Server

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.

RenderMan's Strengths

  1. Performance – Render the largest scenes with efficiency
  2. Quality – Create the highest quality images possible with features like advanced filtering and true 3D motion blur
  3. Control – The RenderMan Shading Language and RIB (the format for Pixar's 3D data) offer many opportunities to develop solutions for any type of creative challenge

Production Features

  • Memory efficient (see REYES algorithm)
  • Camera Controls
    • Fast 3D motion blur
    • Shutter Timing
    • True 3d depth-of-field
    • Bokeh controls
  • Particles
    • Points (riPoints)
    • Spheres (riSphere)
    • Implicit surfaces (riBlobbies)
  • Hierarchical subdivision surfaces
  • Curve rendering (riCurve primitive)
  • Hair and fur (riCurve primitive)
  • High quality displacements (8, 16, and 32 bit)
  • Deep shadows (Transparent and filtered)
  • Subsurface Scattering (Point based)
  • Global Illumination
    • Ambient Occlusion (ray-traced & point based)
    • Color Bleeding (ray-traced & point based)
    • Image Based Lighting (HDRI)
    • Caustics (photon based)
    • Ray-traced area lights
  • Pixar's Organized Point Clouds (with API)
  • Pixar's Brick Maps (with API)
  • Ray Tracing
    • Hybrid system (sub-system of RSL)
    • Programmable ray tracing
    • Ray tracing groups
  • CSG (Booleans in the renderer)
  • Secondary Outputs (AOVs)
  • OpenEXR (reading and writing)
  • And more ...

Fast and Dependable 

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.

Tools of the Trade

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.

Versatile Rendering System

Use RenderMan to create any look you need. From simulating traditional 2D animation to creating complex yet subtle environmental effects, RenderMan will deliver.

Ray Tracing and Global Illumination

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.

Render Passes For Compositing

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

Call RenderMan Anytime

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.

The RenderMan Interface Specification

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

 

Unleash the Power of Shaders

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's Bag of Tricks: Utilities

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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