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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that Renderman was just an internal tool. I didn’t realize they sold it.

Renderman has been used by pretty much every VFX studio for the last 30 years [1]. I remember downloading and dabbling with it along with BMRT [2] in the early 2000s. It was the first widely used tool to have a procedural first approach to rendering.

[1] https://renderman.pixar.com/movies

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Rendering_Tools

I was curious, so checked the Wayback machine. The renderman.pixar.com site has existed since 2005, offering it for sale. I don't know if it was for sale prior to the domain existing: https://web.archive.org/web/20050509112303/https://renderman...

It’s been on sale for as long as Pixar has existed. Toy Story was sold to Jobs as a showcase for selling more Renderman instances.

Exactly this. The critically acclaimed and profitable films are in a sense just adverts for the tool. They're proof that you could not only have an Oscar-winning movie that used this tool for effects, you can make the entire movie with this tool.

See also: Disneyland. People really like Disneyland, and it's profitable for Disney, but it's also one enormous advertisement for their products.

Since Disney and Pixar merged their focus has been on making film franchises and the surrounding merchandise. So it's understandable that most people don't know that wasn't always their focus. When Jobs took over Pixar, he thought they were making a competitor to SGI. They had ambitions to sell not just Renderman licenses, but Renderman hardware. Jobs really wanted them to be a hardware company. They probably saw themselves as occupying the role NVIDIA fills today.

The feature film animation studio was sold to Jobs as a way to market their technology, in order to sell more licenses and create the market which would want their (still theoretical) dedicated GPU hardware.

Turns out the better play was making an animation studio that would rival and then eventually demolish and replace (via merger and integration) the iconic hand-drawn Disney animation.

I suspect the heads of the animation studio within Pixar knew what they were doing though.

I remember it in the late nineties it being selectable, probably with a separate license, into softimage running on sgi workstations.

They do. It actually came with NeXTSTEP too.

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