Blue Moon Rendering Tools, or BMRT, was one of the most famous

RenderMan The name RenderMan can cause confusion because it has been used to refer to different things developed by Pixar Animation Studios: * RenderMan Interface Specification (RISpec), an open API (technical specification) developed by Pixar for a standard ...

-compliant photorealistic rendering systems and was a precursor to NVIDIA's

Gelato Gelato (; ) is the common word in Italian for all kinds of ice cream. In English, it specifically refers to a frozen dessert of Italian origin. Artisanal gelato in Italy generally contains 6%–9% butterfat, which is lower than other styles o ...

renderer. It was distributed as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

. BMRT was a popular renderer with students and other people who were trying to learn the

RenderMan interface The RenderMan Interface Specification, or RISpec in short, is an open API developed by Pixar Animation Studios to describe three-dimensional scenes and turn them into digital photorealistic images. It includes the RenderMan Shading Language. A ...

. It also had some features

PhotoRealistic RenderMan Pixar RenderMan (formerly PhotoRealistic RenderMan) is proprietary photorealistic 3D rendering software produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar uses RenderMan to render their in-house 3D animated movie productions and it is also available as ...

did not have at the time, for example, ray tracing, radiosity,

volume rendering In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field. A typical 3D data set is a group of 2D slice images ...

, and area lights. Even

Pixar Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...

used BMRT for ray tracing before PRMan had such features. According to Exluna, it was used for

3D rendering 3D rendering is the 3D computer graphics process of converting 3D modeling, 3D models into 2D computer graphics, 2D images on a computer. 3D renders may include photorealistic rendering, photorealistic effects or non-photorealistic rendering, no ...

in movies such as ''

A Bug's Life ''A Bug's Life'' is a 1998 American computer-animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It was the second feature-length film produced by Pixar. Directed by John Lasseter and co-directed by Andrew Stant ...

'', ''

Stuart Little ''Stuart Little'' is a 1945 American children's novel by E. B. White. It was White's first children's book, and it is now widely recognized as a classic in children's literature. ''Stuart Little'' was illustrated by the subsequently award-winnin ...

'', '' The Cell'', ''

Hollow Man Hollow may refer to: Natural phenomena *Hollow, a low, wooded area, such as a copse *Hollow (landform), a small vee-shaped, riverine type of valley *Tree hollow, a void in a branch or trunk, which may provide habitat for animals Places * Sleepy ...

'', and ''

Woman on Top Woman on top is any sex position in which the woman is on top of her sexual partner during sexual activity. The position most commonly associated with the woman on top is often called the cowgirl or riding position, which derives its name from ...

''. BMRT was originally developed by Larry Gritz while he was at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. He developed it during the early 1990s, first published it in 1994, and was subsequently hired by

to work on their PhotoRealistic RenderMan product. The last version of the renderer under the BMRT name was 2.6, released in November 2000. The first version of Entropy, BMRT's successor, was 3.0, released in July 2001. In 2000, Gritz left Pixar to form a company called Exluna, whose flagship product was

Entropy Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynam ...

, a RenderMan renderer based on BMRT with additional features and optimizations.

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

acquired Exluna and Entropy in early 2002. Amid the acquisition, Pixar sued Gritz and Exluna (now NVIDIA) for a variety of

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

trade secret Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that includes formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily asc ...

, and

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

issues that were categorically denied by Exluna. The case eventually settled, leading to the discontinuation of BMRT and Entropy. Gritz and other Exluna employees stayed at NVIDIA to develop the

renderer.

Gallery

BMRT - Dresser.png, A dresser with light bouncing off the mirror demonstrating radiosity and ray tracing BMRT - Teapots.png,

Utah teapot The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot that appears solid ...

s with ray-traced reflection and refraction BMRT - Volume rendering.png,

Volume rendering In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field. A typical 3D data set is a group of 2D slice images ...

BMRT - Displacement Shader.png,

Displacement mapping Displacement mapping is an alternative computer graphics technique in contrast to bump, normal, and parallax mapping, using a texture or height map to cause an effect where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are ' ...

BMRT - Balls 1.png,

Anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used be ...

and shadow demo BMRT - Balls 2.png,

Bump mapping Bump mapping is a texture mapping technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting calcul ...

and reflections without using reflection maps

References

External links

The Demise of BMRT & entropy
from the RenderMan Repository

archived version through The Internet Archive {{Renderman software Rendering systems 3D rendering software for Linux Proprietary commercial software for Linux Freeware 3D graphics software Global illumination software