Reyes rendering

Reyes rendering is a computer software architecture used in 3D computer graphics to render photo-realistic images. It was developed in the mid-1980s by Loren Carpenter and Robert L. Cook at Lucasfilm's Computer Graphics Research Group, which is now Pixar. It was first used in 1982 to render images for the Genesis effect sequence in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Pixar's RenderMan is one implementation of the Reyes algorithm. According to the original paper describing the algorithm, the Reyes image rendering system is "An architecture ... for fast high-quality rendering of complex images." Reyes was proposed as a collection of algorithms and data processing systems. However, the terms "algorithm" and "architecture" have come to be used synonymously and are used interchangeably in this article.

Reyes is an acronym for Renders Everything You Ever Saw (the name is also a pun on Point Reyes, California, near where Lucasfilm was located) and is suggestive of processes connected with optical imaging systems. According to Robert L. Cook, Reyes is written with only the first letter capitalized, as it is in the 1987 Cook/Carpenter/Catmull SIGGRAPH paper.

The architecture was designed with a number of goals in mind:

Reyes efficiently achieves several effects that were deemed necessary for film-quality rendering: Smooth, curved surfaces; surface texturing; motion blur; and depth of field.

Reyes renders curved surfaces, such as those represented by parametric patches, by dividing them into micropolygons, small quadrilaterals each less than one pixel in size. Although many micropolygons are necessary to approximate curved surfaces accurately, they can be processed with simple, parallelizable operations. A Reyes renderer tessellates high-level primitives into micropolygons on demand, dividing each primitive only as finely as necessary to appear smooth in the final image.

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