The name RenderMan can cause confusion because it has been used to refer to different things developed by
Pixar Animation Studios
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, Califor ...
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RenderMan Interface Specification
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.
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(RISpec), an open
API (technical specification) developed by Pixar for a standard communications protocol (or interface) between 3D computer graphics programs and rendering programs to describe three-dimensional scenes and turn them into digital
photorealistic
Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be ...
images
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RenderMan Shading Language Renderman Shading Language (abbreviated RSL) is a component of the RenderMan Interface Specification, and is used to define shaders. The language syntax is C-like.
A shader written in RSL can be used without changes on any RenderMan-compliant ren ...
, a component of the RenderMan Interface Specification used to define shaders
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Pixar 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 ...
, a RenderMan Interface Specification-compliant rendering software system developed by Pixar based on their own interface specification
* RenderMan, also commonly used to refer to other renderers because of their compliance with the RenderMan standard
{{Renderman software