![]() ![]() ![]() The studio's mascot is Luxo Jr., a desk lamp from the studio's 1986 short film of the same name. Pixar is best known for its feature films, technologically powered by RenderMan, the company's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan Interface Specification image-rendering API. Disney purchased Pixar in January 2006 at a valuation of $7.4+ billion by converting each share of Pixar stock to 2.3 shares of Disney stock. It was known as the Graphics Group before its spin-off as a corporation in 1986, with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who became its majority shareholder. Pixar started in 1979 as part of the Lucasfilm computer division. Since 2006, Pixar has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company. This programmable shading aspect is one of the things that makes RenderMan enormously popular, since it gives users total control over lighting and appearances of surfaces and volumes in their scenes.Pixar Animation Studios ( / ˈ p ɪ k s ɑːr/) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Part II of the Spec, 'The RenderMan Shading Language' (RSL), describes a C-like language (with a rich set of shading-related function calls) for writing custom shading and lighting programs called shaders. RIB can be regarded as a scene description format meant for use by modelling programs to generate data for RenderMan-compliant renderers. The interface is then described in great detail, using procedural API calls in C/C++ and their corresponding RIB ( RenderMan Interface Bytestream) equivalents. This is followed by a list of advanced/optional capabilities such as motion blur, depth of field and global illumination. Part I, 'The RenderMan Interface', begins by listing the core capabilities (required features) that all RenderMan-compliant renderers need to provide, such as a complete hierarchical graphics state, camera transformations, pixel filtering and antialiasing and the ability to do shading calculations via user-supplied shaders written in the RenderMan shading language. Here is a brief tour of the Spec, which is divided into two parts. The 'how' is up to the individual implementations to handle - they can freely employ scanline algorithms, ray-tracing, radiosity, point-based graphics or any other technique to render the output. This is because the interface specifies what to render (via geometry, lights, material and camera descriptions) but not how. All the renderers would produce pretty much the same output image from the scene description, regardless of how their internals are structured. In practical terms, this means that if a piece of modeling/animation program were to output its scene description in an established format, that scene description should be able to serve as input to a variety of renderers that handle that format. ![]() The idea is that each side can focus on its own specialty, and formal 'handshake' protocol can lead to successful mixing and matching between the two. The RI Spec defines a clear separation (or boundary, or interface) between modeling and animation programs on one hand, and rendering programs on the other. Renderers are specialized, complex programs that embody a variety of algorithms which collectively lead to image synthesis. In a 3D graphics pipeline, rendering is the last step (after modeling, animation and lighting) that generates an image out of a scene description. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |