Robust, Fast, and Cutting Edge Rendering
Learn about the historic impact of RenderMan with this fantastic feature from our friends at 
State-of-the-Art
RenderMan has been Pixar's core rendering technology for over 30 years, and has been developed to meet the ever-increasing challenges of 3D animation and visual effects.
Modern and Robust
Today, RenderMan has been completely modernized, with a state-of-the-art ray tracing architecture. Used in the biggest blockbusters and episodic series, such as The Mandalorian, Inside Out 2 and Avatar: The Way of Water, RenderMan is capable of delivering the highest quality visual effects with unparalleled creative flexibility and artistic control.
For artists, RenderMan is easier than ever to use with single pass workflows and interactive shading, lighting, and look development, while continuing its tradition of reliability and expandability.
RenderMan is not only a standalone rendering powerhouse, it offers customers fully integrated plugins for Autodesk Maya, SideFX Houdini, Foundry's Katana, and Blender.
Inside Out 2 © Disney/Pixar
RenderMan Rebooted
The RIS technology in RenderMan has matured and evolved through rewrites to the raytracing core, new hair descriptions, memory optimizations, and pipeline groundwork, resulting in a highly-optimized framework for production needs.
Always Evolving
In its latest evolution, RenderMan XPU™ has revolutionized interactive rendering workflows for production pipelines by bringing the power of both the GPU & CPU to look development.
With RenderMan, customers have access to Pixar's production shading, lighting, and stylization toolset, reflecting an ongoing commitment to delivering the very same technology used by Pixar.
Entergalactic © Netflix
Genuine Production Excellence
Product Driven, Results Focused
RenderMan is used for all Pixar production rendering, including feature films, shorts, content for theme parks and marketing.
RenderMan is battle tested and driven by real production requirements at Pixar and studios around the world.
Expert Training and Support
Every commercial customer has direct access to the most awarded development team in the industry, as well as in-depth training materials created by production experts, artists, and developers which are made available online in a variety of formats targeting all levels of skill.
Creative Studio Ecosystems
Artists interact with RenderMan through content creation plugins tailored specifically for the leading 3D apps.
Studios integrate RenderMan into pipelines and massive render farms using a rich collection of APIs and supported data formats.
"For significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan."
-Academy of Motion Pictures Art and Sciences
Technology Awards
The Academy has also recognized the technological advancements of RenderMan's development team with numerous Sci-Tech awards, giving RenderMan users an amazing groundwork of production-proven experience.
- 2023 - RenderMan receives the prestigious IEEE Milestone Award for pioneering work in computer graphics, marking a momentous milestone for Pixar’s flagship renderer. IEEE’s award reminds us of the revolutionary work started at Pixar in 1981 by visionaries Tom Porter, Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Loren Carpenter, Rob Cook, Pat Hanrahan, Tony Apodaca, Darwyn Peachey, and Jim Lawson, who gave exciting presentations about the history of RenderMan at Pixar Animation Studios.
- 2011 - Scientific & Engineering Award David Laur was honored for his work with Pixar's Alfred render queue management system. A total of six developers were honored for their work on various queueing systems which have allowed studios to process the large amounts of data required for 3D animation and visual effects. At the award ceremony, David Laur pondered the possible effects of Academy recognition, "It's certainly true that nobody grows up to say 'I want to be a queuing systems engineer,'" he told the audience. "Now there'll be action figures."
- 2010 - Scientific & Engineering Award To Per Christensen, Christophe Hery, and Michael Bunnell for the development of point-based rendering for indirect illumination and ambient occlusion, and featured in Pixar's RenderMan. Much faster than previous ray-traced methods, this computer graphics technique has enabled color bleeding effects and realistic shadows for complex scenes in motion pictures.
- 2009 - The Gordon E. Sawyer Award The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Ed Catmull with the Gordon E.Sawyer Award, for a lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry, including his work with Pixar's RenderMan.
- 2009 - The Coons Award (SIGGRAPH 2009) This year's award is presented to Rob Cook (Vice President of Advanced Technology, Pixar Animation Studios) for his foundational contributions to physically-based reflectance models and distribution ray tracing and his enduring work on behalf of the SIGGRAPH community. The Steven A. Coons Award is given in odd-numbered years to an individual to honor that person's lifetime contribution to the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
- 2001 - Academy Award of Merit - "Oscar®" Ed Catmull, Loren Carpenter, and Rob Cook, were honored with an Academy Award® of Merit (Oscar®) “for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar’s RenderMan®.” This was the first Oscar awarded to the developers of a software package for its outstanding contributions to the field.
1993 - Scientific & Engineering Award In 1993 the developers of Pixar's RenderMan (Loren Carpenter , Rob Cook, Ed Catmull, Thomas Porter, Pat Hanrahan, Tony Apodaca & Darwyn Peachey) won a Scientific and Engineering Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for RenderMan's contribution to the motion picture industry.
