This language completely describes arbitrary shaders that can be passed to a renderer through the RenderMan interface. Of particular interest, however, is the portion of RenderMan called the RenderMan Shading Language. OpenGL already provides many of these capabilities therefore, they need not be addressed in the OpenGL Shading Language.įigure 21.1. RenderMan includes support for describing geometric primitives, hierarchical modeling, stacking geometric transformations, camera attributes, shading attributes, and constructive solid geometry. Although a hardware implementation was envisioned at the time RenderMan was first defined, it was primarily designed as a high-quality, realistic rendering interface therefore, it provides no compromises for interactivity or direct hardware implementation on today's graphics hardware.
It provides an entire graphics processing pipeline of its own that has no relationship to OpenGL. One of the main differences between the OpenGL Shading Language and RenderMan is that RenderMan attempts to define the entire interface between modeling programs and rendering programs. It has also been used for films that have been done entirely with computer graphics such as Finding Nemo, Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Monsters, Inc. It has been used as the interface for producing computer graphics special effects for films such as Jurassic Park, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and others. The original target audience for this interface was animation production, and the interface has proved to be very successful for this market. This was an interface intended to define the communications protocol between modeling programs and rendering programs aimed at producing images of photorealistic quality. In 1988, after several years of development, Pixar published the RenderMan Interface Specification.
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