This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media.
The first Oscar of the new millennium went not to an actor, but to a computer program, or more accurately, the three computer scientists who developed several technologies embodied in the program. The men are Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull, and Rob Cook of Pixar Animation Studios. The program is RenderMan, a computer graphics rendering tool used in such stellar movies as Toy Story, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and The Matrix.
The story of RenderMan started years before the three Oscar winners first met, as each independently dreamed up techniques that would ultimately thrust computer graphics into the spotlight. IEEE Spectrum explains the breakthroughs that preceded RenderMan, including procedural modeling of fractals, texture mapping, and a physics-based light model. The article also profiles Carpenter, Catmull, and Cook, and tells how they came to work together on the architecture of software that would change movie-making forever.
Contact: Tekla S. Perry, 650 328 7570, [email protected].For faxed copies of the complete article ("And the Oscar Goes To . . ." by Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry, IEEE Spectrum, April 2001, pp. 52-57) or to arrange an interview, contact: Nancy T. Hantman, 212 419 7561, [email protected].
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