Blue Moon Rendering Tools

Blue Moon Rendering Tools (short BMRT ) was a RenderMan -compatible, photo-realistic renderer and the precursor for Nvidia's Gelato renderer. Its use was free for non- commercial purposes. BMRT was popular for learning RenderMan interface. He also had some features that Pixar's RenderMan PhotoRealistic ( PRMan ) at that time had not, such as ray tracing. Even Pixar used BMRT to integrate its Raytracingfunktionalität in RenderMan ( PRMan from 3.8). About DSOs (Dynamic Shared Objects), it is possible to implement your own functions in a RenderMan -compliant renderer. Thus, it was in PRMan a specially programmed trace ( ) function call implemented, which ultimately served to BMRT call of PRMan out to use its Raytracingfunktion. This is called in the case of BMRT of a Ray server (from BMRT Release 2.3.6 this was possible). The advantage was that BMRT was called by PRMan only when it comes to raytracing there was something in the 3D scene, which should be calculated. The precalculated by PRMan data were passed to BMRT and sent back to PRMan after completion of Raytracingprozesses. According Exluna it was to render movies like A Bug's Life, Stuart Little, The Cell, Hollow used Man and Woman on Top.

BMRT was originally developed by Larry Gritz, as he worked at Cornell University. He developed it during the early 1990s, published in 1994, and was subsequently hired by Pixar to work on their product PhotoRealistic RenderMan.

The latest version of the renderer under the name BMRT was spending 2.6, released in November 2000. The first version of Entropy, the successor BMRT was spending 3.0, released in July 2001.

In 2000, Gritz left the company Pixar to create his own company called Exluna, whose main product was Entropy, a RenderMan -compliant renderer based on BMRT with additional features and optimization. The company Nvidia took over Exluna early 2002 and their product Entropy. In the middle of the transfer phase by Nvidia sued Pixar Larry Gritz and his company Exluna for alleged patent, non-disclosure agreements and copyright infringements that have been denied continuously from Exluna. The suit was ultimately settled and ended in the setting of the development of BMRT and Entropy by Exluna. Gritz and his staff were taken over by Nvidia, in order to develop the combined hardware and software render gelato.