Speaker: Per Christensen
Pixar Animation Studios
Thursday, June 7, 2007
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
EBU3b 4140

ABSTRACT
In this talk I will describe how we extended Pixar's RenderMan renderer with ray tracing abilities. This ray tracing functionality has been used in many recent movies, including Pixar's 'Cars' and 'Ratatouille'. In order to ray trace highly complex scenes we use multiresolution geometry and texture caches, and use ray differentials to determine the appropriate resolution. With this method we are able to efficiently ray trace scenes with much more geometry and texture data than there is main memory. Movie-quality rendering of scenes of such complexity had only previously been possible with pure scanline rendering algorithms. Adding ray tracing to the renderer enables many additional effects such as accurate reflections, detailed shadows, and ambient occlusion.

BIO
Per Christensen is a senior software developer in Pixar's RenderMan group. His main research interest is efficient ray tracing and global illumination in very complex scenes. He received an M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in Seattle.