Papers by Jonathan Shade


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Multiresolution Radiosity Caching for Efficient Preview and Final Quality Global Illumination in Movies

Per H. Christensen, George Harker, Jonathan Shade, Brenden Schubert, Dana Batali
July 2012

We present a multiresolution radiosity caching method that allows global illumination to be computed efficiently in a single pass in complex CG movie production scenes.

For distribution ray tracing in production scenes, the bottleneck is the time spent evaluating complex shaders at the ray hit points. We speed up this shader ... more

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [globillum.m4v], [siggraphslides.pdf], [siggraphtalk.pdf], [subsurf.m4v]

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #12-06


RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering

Per Christensen, Julian Fong, Jonathan Shade, Wayne Wooten, Brenden Schubert, Andrew Kensler, Stephen Friedman, Charlie Kilpatrick, Cliff Ramshaw, Marc Bannister, Brenton Rayner, Jonathan Brouillat, Max Liani
July 2018

Pixar's RenderMan renderer is used to render all of Pixar's films, and by many film studios to render visual effects for live-action movies. RenderMan started as a scanline renderer based on the Reyes algorithm, and was extended over the years with ray tracing and several global illumination algorithms. This paper describes the modern version of ... more

Paper (PDF)