Framestore is a British animation and visual effects studio based on Chancery Lane in London, England. Formed in 1985, Framestore specialises in effects for film and prestige TV, advertising, rides and immersive experiences. It is the largest production house in Europe, employing roughly 3,000 staff, including 1,000 in London, and 1,500 across studios in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Melbourne and Mumbai.
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set that runs on Windows, MacOS, BSD, Haiku, and Linux. It is used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games. Blender's features include 3D modelling, UV mapping, texturing, digital drawing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animation, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, Python scripting, and compositing.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began production on the original Star Wars, now the fourth episode of the Skywalker Saga.
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has offices worldwide. Its U.S. offices are located in the states of California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its Canada offices are located in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta.
Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools.
Softimage, Co. was a company located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada that produced 3D animation software. A subsidiary of Microsoft in the 1990s, it was sold to Avid Technology, who would eventually sell the name and assets of Softimage's 3D-animation business to Autodesk.
Luxo Jr. is a 1986 American animated short film produced and released by Pixar. Written and directed by John Lasseter, the two-minute short film revolves around one larger and one smaller desk lamp. The larger lamp, named Luxo Sr., looks on while the smaller, "younger" Luxo Jr. plays exuberantly with a ball to the extent that it accidentally deflates. Luxo Jr. was Pixar's first animation after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter left the Lucasfilm Computer Division. The film is the source of Luxo Jr., the mascot of Pixar.
Pixar RenderMan is a photorealistic 3D rendering software produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar uses RenderMan to render their in-house 3D animated movie productions and it is also available as a commercial product licensed to third parties. In 2015, a free non-commercial version of RenderMan became available.
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 was an implementation of the Reyes algorithm, It has been deprecated as of 2016 and removed as of RenderMan 21. 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 in this context and are used interchangeably in this article.
Vue is a software tool for world generation by Bentley Systems with support for many visual effects, animations and various other features. The tool has been used in several feature-length movies.
Pixomondo (PXO) is an Academy and Emmy award-winning international visual effects and virtual production company with studios in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and London. The company provides virtual production and visual effects for feature films, television, and commercials. As of 2019, PXO employs over 655 people worldwide.
Messiah is a 3D animation and rendering application developed by pmG Worldwide. It runs on the Win32 and Win64 platforms. It is marketed to run on Mac OS X and Linux via Wine. Messiah's fourth version, messiah:studio was released April 2009 and version 5.5b as messiah:animate was released November 2006. messiahStudio6 was released in April 2013. Messiah seems no longer maintained since 2013 (abandoned).
3D computer graphics software refers to packages used to create 3D computer-generated imagery.
Maxwell Render is an unbiased 3D render engine, developed by Next Limit Technologies in Madrid, Spain. This stand-alone software is used in the film, animation, and VFX industry, as well as in architectural and product design visualization. It offers various plug-ins for 3D/CAD and post production applications.
Golaem is a France-based software developer of solutions dedicated to the population of 3D environments using autonomous human-like characters.
Alembic is an interchangeable computer graphics file format developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic. It was announced at SIGGRAPH 2011, and has been widely adopted across the industry by visual effects and animation professionals.
Autodesk Arnold is a computer program for rendering three-dimensional, computer-generated scenes using unbiased, physically-based, Monte Carlo path tracing techniques. Created in Spain by Marcos Fajardo, it was later co-developed by his company Solid Angle SL and Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a shading language developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, a Canadian visual effects and computer animation studio headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia and Montreal, Quebec, with an additional office on the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City, California, a unit of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group, which through an intermediate holding company called Sony Film Holding Inc., it is operated as a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which is itself a subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, for use in its Arnold Renderer. It is also supported by Illumination Research's 3Delight renderer, Otoy's Octane Render, V-Ray 3, Redshift, and the Cycles render engine in Blender. OSL's surface and volume shaders define how surfaces or volumes scatter light in a way that allows for importance sampling; thus, it is well suited for physically based renderers that support ray tracing and global illumination.
ZERO VFX is a visual effects and creative studio with offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Venice Beach, California. Co-founded by Brian Drewes, Sean Devereaux and Marc Sadeghi in 2010, the company works on feature film and commercial projects.
