Edwin Catmull was hired by legendary
filmmaker George Lucas to head the computer-
technology division that became Pixar when
Apple founder Steve Jobs bought it. Patrick
Hanrahan was one of Catmull’s early hires at
Pixar, now part of Disney.
Together, the two worked on techniques that
made graphics in movies like “Toy Story” look
more lifelike, even though Hanrahan left Pixar
years before the studio released that film.
Catmull is the former president of Pixar and
worked there for more than three decades.
“What makes skin look like skin? What makes
a tree look like a tree? You have to understand
the structure of material and how light interacts
with it,” Hanrahan said in an interview with The
Associated Press. Only then is it possible to
translate that understanding of how the physics
of curved surfaces — our hands, our noses —
works with light into the 100,00-plus frames that
make up a movie.
Hanrahan’s “RenderMan” software helped
produce “Toy Story” in 1995 and then a string
of Pixar films like “Up,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Finding
Nemo” and “Wall-E.” It was also the backbone of
CGI special effects in live-action movies such as
“Titanic” and the “Lord of the Rings” films.
The Association for Computing Machinery,
which awards the prize, says filmmakers used
RenderMan software in nearly all of the last
47 movies nominated for a visual effects
Academy Award.
The technology has also indirectly helped the
artificial-intelligence field. The chips that were
developed for video-game graphics were so
powerful that they could then be used to train
AI algorithms.