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.

We present a simple stochastic system for non-periodically tiling the plane with a small set of Wang Tiles. The tiles may be filled with texture, patterns, or geometry that when assembled create a continuous representation. The primary advantage of using Wang Tiles is that once the tiles are filled, large expanses of non-periodic texture (or patterns or geometry) can be created as needed very efficiently at runtime.Wang Tiles are squares in which each edge is assigned a color. A valid tiling requires all shared edges between tiles to have matching colors. We present a new stochastic algorithm to non-periodically tile the plane with a small set of Wang Tiles at runtime.Furthermore, we present new methods to fill the tiles with 2D texture, 2D Poisson distributions, or 3D geometry to efficiently create at runtime as much non-periodic texture (or distributions, or geometry) as needed. We leverage previous texture synthesis work and adapt it to fill Wang Tiles. We demonstrate how to fill individual tiles with Poisson distributions that maintain their statistical properties when combined. These are used to generate a large arrangement of plants or other objects on a terrain. We show how such environments can be rendered efficiently by pre-lighting the individual Wang Tiles containing the geometry.We also extend the definition of Wang Tiles to include a coding of the tile corners to allow discrete objects to overlap more than one edge. The larger set of tiles provides increased degrees of freedom.

In this paper we present a set of efficient image based rendering methods capable of rendering multiple frames per second on a PC. The first method warps Sprites with Depth representing smooth surfaces without the gaps found in other techniques. A second method for more general scenes performs warping from an intermediate representation called a Layered Depth Image (LDI). An LDI is a view of the scene from a single input camera view, but with multiple pixels along each line of sight. The size of the representation grows only linearly with the observed depth complexity in the scene. Moreover, because the LDI data are represented in a single image coordinate system, McMillan's warp ordering algorithm can be successfully adapted. As a result, pixels are drawn in the output image in back-to-front order. No z-buffer is required, so alphacompositing can be done efficiently without depth sorting. This makes splatting an efficient solution to the resampling problem. 1 Introduction Image base...

We present a new method for accelerating walkthroughs of geometrically complex static scenes. As a preprocessing step, our method constructs a BSP-tree that hierarchically partitions the geometric primitives in the scene. In the course of a walkthrough, images of nodes at various levels of the hierarchy are cached for reuse in subsequent frames. A cached image is applied as a texture map to a single quadrilateral that is drawn instead of the geometry contained in the corresponding node. Visual artifacts are kept under control by using an error metric that quantifies the discrepancy between the appearance of the geometry contained in a node and the cached image. The new method is shown to achieve significant speedups for a walkthrough of a complex outdoor scene, with little or no loss in rendering quality. 1 Introduction Interactive visualization of extremely complex geometric environments is becoming an increasingly important application of computer graphics. Advances in the throughp...