Papers by Stephen Friedman


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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)


RenderMan XPU: A Hybrid CPU+GPU Renderer for Interactive and Final-Frame Rendering

Per Christensen, Julian Fong, Charlie Kilpatrick, Francisco Gonzalez, Srinath Ravichandran, Akshay Shah, Ethan Jaszewski, Stephen Friedman, James Burgess, Trina M. Roy, Tom Nettleship, Meghana Seshadri, Susan Salituro
June 2025

RenderMan XPU is a rewrite of Pixar's RenderMan renderer, designed to run on both CPUs and GPUs. Like its predecessor, it is a progressive path tracer, suitable for both interactive previews and high-quality final-frame rendering, but it utilizes modern hardware and software techniques to run significantly faster. Most ... more

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [video.mp4]

Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics)