Ed’s Big Monday
Although Siggraph doesn’t get rolling in earnest until the show floor opens on Tuesday, Monday was a plenty busy day for the legendary Ed Catmull. Ed, of course, is now president of both Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, but Monday, he went back to his computer graphics roots with a full schedule that included a featured speech, a press conference celebrating the–believe this if you can–20th Anniversary of RenderMan (it’s in version 14.0! has any software ever gone to a 14th version without changing its name or ownership?), and a book signing on behalf of a legion of CG geeks who were lined up down the hallway on the second floor of the West Hall of the LA Convention Center today. (He was signing “To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios” by Karen Paik–Catmull penned the forward.)
In his press conference chat, Catmull spoke to the media, along with his colleagues, Dana Batali, Director of RenderMan Products, and Chris Ford, RenderMan Business Director, about the revolutionary rendering product’s colorful history and impact on the worlds of computer animation, feature films, and visual effects. Ford quoted a statistic saying that 80 of the top 100 CG films in history, and all of the top 15, were rendered in RenderMan, and Batali discussed the software’s technical innovations, and where it might go next, as did Catmull.
But Catmull also marveled at the fact that the product has been around 20 years, even managing to utter a couple of “Holy Cow’s” over how quickly times does, indeed, fly. And Batali pointed out that when you consider the years of development that Catmull and his colleagues put into building the core architecture for what would eventually become RenderMan, his involvement with the software actually goes back closer to 30 years.
“Providing a shading language and actual motion blur were the two big things we started off with that propelled it and made it something new (in the 1990’s), when there was radical change in our industry,” Catmull pointed out.
Today, he and Batali suggest, it is the massive Renderman user community that is driving the software’s continued areas of innovation, including in version 14.0, accelerated ray-tracing, faster processing of large polygon data-sets, optimized hair performance, and lots of other pretty cool stuff.
Watch this blog for a little audio clip shortly from the press conference that includes part of Catmull’s conversation with Batali.
–Michael Goldman
