Pixar

Computer hardware is any physical device used in or with your machine, whereas software is a collection of code installed onto your computer’s hard drive.

From its earliest days as a hardware developer, the company’s technology has been inextricably intertwined with the development of the computer graphics industry. Its early short films, like Luxo Jr, and its debut feature film, Toy Story, introduced the world to RenderMan, now the industry-standard software for rendering (the process of generating finished two-dimensional images from the geometry, surfacing and lighting data used to create a three-dimensional animation).

Pixar

Pixars computer programming is in the top 25 super computers in the world.

(With the help of Disneys finance)

The 2,000 computers have more than 24,000 cores. The data center is like the beating heart behind the movie’s technology.

Even with all of that computing might, it still takes 29 hours to render a single frame of Monsters University, according to supervising technical director Sanjay Bakshi (two times more powerful than the last)

Pixar introducing RenderMan, the animation industry was revolutionalized. In fact, the last 44 of the 47 movies which had won the Oscars for visual effects had used the RenderMan software.

toy story

Since Toy Story was completed there has been a trend toward greater visual complexity in each of their films. Tom Porter, supervising technical director onMonsters, Inc. — and winner of two Oscars — says Toy Story was made with 1/50th the computing power available today.