Pixar's RenderMan and Proprietary Technology in CGI Animation

Curator's Note

Among the credits for this behind-the-scenes video by Fido, a Swedish animation company, one finds the following note: “Shading/Rendering: Pixar’s RenderMan Studio.” In fact, many viewers first find this video not through Fido's marketing channels, but on Pixar's RenderMan website. Carefully positioned to the side of Pixar’s entertainment branch, turned away from animation viewers and toward animation producers, the proprietary RenderMan platform broadcasts the studio's global technological influence — an influence that turns hundreds of companies like Fido into RenderMan success stories rather than Pixar competitors. 

RenderMan developed alongside Pixar since the mid-1980s, designed to efficiently compute which parts of an animated scene need to be processed in detail, and which can be pre-discarded. This allows for more rapid and complex computation of textures and lights. RenderMan built on a preceding pioneering structure also developed by Pixar’s founders, REYES, which breaks up processing tasks and distributes them across networks of computers, dividing complex operations among multiple machines ("farms"). To characterize it very broadly, RenderMan is a structure for highly efficient image dissection and analysis. 

However, RenderMan has not only made Pixar’s animated films technically possible, it also, in part, defined the company’s animation philosophy. The initial REYES acronym is anecdotally deciphered as a call to “Render Everything You Ever Saw,” a mission that reveals the studio’s commitment to verisimilitude and its singular preoccupation with visible surfaces. The software’s particular strengths privilege extremes of surface complexity: complex texture (fabric, fur, hair, grass) and complex reflectivity (glass, shiny steel, crystal). As such, many of Pixar’s critically acclaimed characters and environments were first circulated as demos for various RenderMan iterations, and many are prominently promoted on the RenderMan website as case studies for the software. 

Fido's CGI reconstruction of an endangered falcon, produced for a nature conservation society, seems so different from Pixar’s animation style. Yet one can also consider how the video's application of RenderMan extends Pixar’s underlying ethos— to synthetically reconstruct the real world through its optically accessible surface. The rendered sunlit feathers of the soaring bird hold out a promise to resurrect the surface of life (Presto!), even after it goes extinct. Technological development and competition have always been a central part of commercial animation history. Pixar’s RenderMan exemplifies the integral role that proprietary technology continues to play in CGI authorship, as more studios and directors invest in software development and ownership.


Thank you for your contribution this week. I found your exploration of the ways that in-house software development has led to the growth of popular CGI companies like Pixar particularly fascinating. As you mentioned early on in the article, Pixar’s “RenderMan” has allowed companies like FIDO to thrive as “success stories” rather than Pixar competitors. I am drawn to your conclusion here because proprietary software is often discussed by open source advocates as a way of squelching creativity and limiting the growth of users, and by extension, consumers that could not afford those programs to then become producers. Not to mix technologies, but as someone that has been frustrated with certain companies for using proprietary cables with their hardware, I am generally opposed to the development of proprietary tech. However, your contribution to In Media Res this week seems to have found evidence that demonstrates how proprietary tech can still serve to mushroom an industry while also supporting a closed software system. I wonder, does Pixar use the same software that it sells, or does it somehow distribute a limited program that still grants Pixar an advantage by giving the company access to a more feature-rich version to produce better/more-easily-rendered animations? Thanks again for the great article!

Roger, I really appreciate your connection between proprietary software in the animation industry and debates about open/closed programming elsewhere. I've been thinking about this case study in connection to a much older history of animation technology development (Earl Hurd's patent of the animation "cel" sheet; Fleischer Studio's development of the rotoscope apparatus; Disney's investment in colour printing methods and the multi-plane camera method, etc.) Within this history, proprietary ownership and exclusivity was an important strategy for differentiating one studio's style from the next. Mark Langer has written about this in connection to Disney and Fleischer studios, especially. Some of the same is true of the contemporary CGI animation landscape I briefly sketched out, wherein CGI auteurs like John Lasseter (Pixar CCO), James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Roberto Rodriguez (and so forth) hold major investments in digital effects R&D companies. Proprietary ownership and development of technology remains key to animation studio differentiation and competition in the digital context. However, your remarks reminded me that RenderMan, as a digital technology, also fits into a more recent history of software technology development. As the latter is not my area of expertise, I can offer but a few comments from my perspective and through this particular case study. If we separate Pixar-entertainment from Pixar-technology-R&D (the two are closely intertwined, but also separate in some key respects), we can say that Pixar-entertainment fosters a closed, exclusive, and proprietary approach to animation technology, while Pixar-technology-R&D absolutely depends on collaboration both within and without the animation industry. For example, the latest Pixar software development "Presto!", which I briefly linked in my post, was developed in collaboration with Intel and has itself been used as an Intel success story. Then, Presto! was used for an in-house Pixar film ("Monsters University"), making sure that Pixar-entertainment is the first innovator of the technology and the first to explore the potentialities of the software. So to answer your question, Pixar will keep a temporal advantage. However, eventually, the software will take on a new life, as it is sold and distributed to other companies through channels like Pixar's "RenderMan University"and used by other studios. In fact, it is not uncommon for a CGI-heavy film to include programs and technologies that can be traced to otherwise competing studios. As such, one can say that Pixar-technology a tool for creating Pixar-entertainment products, but one can also say that Pixar-entertainment products are a tool for promoting and selling Pixar-technology. Whether or not this system fosters a network of smaller independent companies like Fido or not -- that question fits into the ongoing software and hardware debates that you mentioned. As you effectively phrase it, the technology helps to "mushroom" an industry. But at the same time, RenderMan is sold to companies, it's not offered as an open-source program. A one-year student subscription to the full RenderMan package currently runs at $200.

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