RenderMan is Pixar's rendering software for producing photorealistic imagery in visual-effects and feature-film animation pipelines.
RenderMan is Pixar's rendering technology, developed at the studio and used to produce imagery for its feature-film animation work. Built around physically based rendering, the software handles shading, lighting, and light transport, with support for ray-traced global illumination and subsurface scattering, and includes material and lighting tools developed in Pixar's production environment, including the MaterialX Lama layering system created with Industrial Light & Magic.
Beyond use at Pixar, RenderMan is employed across the visual-effects and animation industry, and the product is offered in Professional and Non-Commercial editions with plugin integration for common digital-content pipelines such as Maya. It is distributed through Pixar's dedicated RenderMan site, which carries product documentation, training, support, and an upgrade store, and it has been recognized with an IEEE Milestone Award; Pixar describes it as an Academy Award-winning technology.
