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Catmull and Blanchard had been involved with software designed to build 3D geometric objects at the University of Utah.

DiFrancesco and I had been using and developing software that manipulated pixels-'painting' pictures-at Xerox Parc. NYIT's owner, Alexander Schure, hired Ed Catmull, Malcolm Blanchard, and me, adding David DiFrancesco soon after. This vision began to solidify at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) starting about 1975. The floating sun was an accident of the camera tripod being knocked slightly ajar between exposures.

PIXAR RENDERMAN CAPRICIANA HOW TO

Then we figured out how to move those objects, shade them, and light them before rendering them as frames of a movie.Īlvy Ray Smith (left) and Ed Emshwiller at work on Sunstone in 1979 at the New York Institute of Technology. First came the software that enabled computers to create two-dimensional images and, later, virtual 3D objects. In the meantime, we focused on developing the software that would make The Movie possible.īy definition, The Movie could incorporate no hand drawing. But with Moore's Law cranking along at a steady pace, there was every reason to think that the cost of computing power would come down sufficiently within a decade or so.

That kind of computing power was not affordable in the mid-1970s. A handful of us began talking about when somebody would make the first one-'The Movie,' we called it-and the massive computing power it would take to pull it off. The story, instead, goes back to a time when I and other researchers in computer graphics scattered around the United States began to see the technology as allowing a new art form: the creation of digitally animated movies.

Pixar's story doesn't even start with the creation of Lucasfilm's Computer Graphics Group, which developed the Pixar Image Computer, the company's first product. Rather, the original spark often comes from a university lab, a renegade group at a large company, or a hobbyist building stuff for fun. The story of Pixar doesn't start with its founding-a tech company's story rarely does.

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