RenderMan: An Advanced Path-Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering

Pixar’s RenderMan renderer is used to render all of Pixar’s films and by many film studios to render visual effects for live-action movies. RenderMan started as a scanline renderer based on the Reyes algorithm, and it was extended over the years with ray tracing and several global illumination algorithms.

This article describes the modern version of RenderMan, a new architecture for an extensible and programmable path tracer with many features that are essential to handle the fiercely complex scenes in movie production. Users can write their own materials using a bxdf interface and their own light transport algorithms using an integrator interface—or they can use the materials and light transport algorithms provided with RenderMan. Complex geometry and textures are handled with efficient multi-resolution representations, with resolution chosen using path differentials. We trace rays and shade ray hit points in medium-sized groups, which provides the benefits of SIMD execution without excessive memory overhead or data streaming. The path-tracing architecture handles surface, subsurface, and volume scattering. We show examples of the use of path tracing, bidirectional path tracing, VCM, and UPBP light transport algorithms. We also describe our progressive rendering for interactive use and our adaptation of denoising techniques.