The flexibility of RenderMan is that it allows for change and allows for modularity which is why it has adapted so well to the years of various SIGGRAPH innovations, new ideas and Pixar R&D. This was at a time when a fully ray traced system was just not viable. REYES provided a way to render complex scenes but it is just a component of what makes RenderMan the powerhouse it is, and has been for two and a half decades. It was at SIGGRAPH Anaheim 1987 that the original paper The Reyes image rendering architecture was delivered by Cook, Carpenter and Catmull. The RenderMan Interface Specification it is about what you are rendering, not how you are rendering. The original RenderMan specification was not for a product, in fact, it does not even define that you need to render with the REYES scanline approach or today’s bi-directional path tracing. It was in May 1988 when the original RenderMan interface 3.0 was launched, over 25 years ago, but it was actually greater than 25 years for the REYES renderer which was released in 1984 and different from PRMan was released in 1989. It is a part of the RenderMan Compliant Renderer that Pixar has used and sold, but actually pre-dates what we might think of as ‘RenderMan’.
REYES ( Renders Everything You Ever Saw) is the brainchild of Rob Cook, Loren Carpenter and Ed Catmull, and it is not actually ‘RenderMan’. Most people think of the REYES rendering approach as being at the core of RenderMan when thinking of imagery produced by Pixar’s RenderMan, although this has been historically true, RenderMan has been a hybrid renderer for some time now. All the illumination in this scene is provided by the volume there is no other light source in the scene. RenderMan’s Geometric Area Light system enable emissive volumes. All indirect illumination rays in this scene originate from an interaction with the Cornell box, not the volume. This scene demonstrates volume rendering using the Unidirectional Path Tracer, PxrPathTracer. RenderMan is the obvious name for the unified solution, and the ‘V19’ tag is all but dropped from use.
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The new RenderMan has a powerful bi-directional path tracer and serious new technology from Disney Animation, which underlines a new unified approach to rendering from the House of Mouse – the amazing powerhouse that is Disney today.įor those who like version numbers, the new release is built on a v19.0 baseline, and is a consolidation of the components of the previous RenderMan Pro Server (the batch renderer) and RenderMan Studio (the artist’s interface including RenderMan for Maya) into a single RenderMan product that will be continuously updated in both rapid dot and major releases, making traditional versioning more fluid than previously. There will now be one product, used by artists or on the farm, and movable between the two. The new product is a combination of RenderMan Pro Server and RenderMan Studio.
This is clearly the start of the next 25 years. Today the company has announced new breakthrough technology, a new commitment to R&D and massive pricing changes including free access to RenderMan for non-commercial use. Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, along with Dana Batali, VP of RenderMan Products, Chris Ford, RenderMan’s Business Director and the Pixar RenderMan team have introduced sweeping changes to the way RenderMan will be developed, sold and the very latest technology that will ship before SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver. At SIGGRAPH last July, Pixar celebrated 25 years of RenderMan ( see our story here).
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