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.