The movie Toy Story needed top-computers in 1995 to render every frame and that took a lot of time (800000 machine-hours according to Wikipedia).
Could it be possible to render it in real time with modern (2025) GPUs on a single home computer?
The movie Toy Story needed top-computers in 1995 to render every frame and that took a lot of time (800000 machine-hours according to Wikipedia).
Could it be possible to render it in real time with modern (2025) GPUs on a single home computer?
Did Toy Story use ray tracing back then?
AFAIK, A Bug’s Life is the first Pixar movie that used ray tracing to some extent, and that was for a few reflections. Monster’s University is the first Pixar movie that was fully ray traced.
You’re right, it looks like they didn’t (at least for most things?). They do mention raytracing briefly, and that the sampling stage can “combine point samples from this algorithm with point samples from other algorithms that have capabilities such as ray tracing”, but it seems like they describe something like shadow mapping for shadows and regular raster shading techniques (“textures have also been used for refractions and shadows”)?
Interesting paper. I skimmed through it quickly, but it seems like they wanted to avoid relying on ray tracing.
Most of the paper is way above my understanding, so I’m not qualified.
Physically Based Rendering (the freely available book) won its authors a special Academy award in 2014. That book is still the teaching standard for ray tracing so far as I know. In the intro, they discuss Pixar adding ray tracing (based on pbrt) to their RenderMan software in the early 2000s.
A Bugs Life and TS2 could have benefit from some of that, but I’d guess Monsters Inc was the first full outing for it, and certainly by Nemo they must have been doing mostly ray tracing.