Pixar
More info
- Creator
- Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith
- Released
- 1986
- Owner
- Disney (since 2006)
- Type
- Animation studio, graphics software
The film studio that began as a hardware vendor and whose rendering software was an industry standard long before Toy Story.
Pixar started life as Lucasfilm's computer graphics group. Steve Jobs, freshly ousted from Apple, bought it in 1986 and spent years trying to sell the Pixar Image Computer, an expensive graphics workstation that hardly anyone wanted. What survived was the software: the RenderMan renderer and its 1988 interface specification were behind a large share of Hollywood's visual effects.
Toy Story arrived in 1995 as the first feature film made entirely by computer. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock, which made Jobs Disney's largest shareholder. For developers the studio lives on in Universal Scene Description, USD, a 3D scene format open-sourced in 2016 that now underpins, among other things, Nvidia's Omniverse.