Striving to make itself into a brand, PIXAR continued to push the envelope and was well rewarded in 1988 when it was the first computer animated film ever to win an Academy Award, Tin Toy. .
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However, one of the major contributions, PIXAR had given the computing animation community was Renderman, a rendering program that was considered the highest quality renderer available, even today. It had powerful shading (refer to what a shader is in glossary) language and anti-aliased motion blur which allowed designers to integrate stunning synthetic (man/computer made) effects with live-action footage. While Renderman had existed in parts pre-PIXAR, (parts of it was used in the creation of special effects in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan) it was not until further work was done and a decision by PIXAR to license out the renderer would the community come to realize the infinite possibilities that would soon come. To put things into perspective, consider this, during the 1970's texture mapping was discovered (With texture mapping, a picture of a block of marble can be wrapped onto a surface, or group of surfaces, for example, making a model of a statue appear to be made of marble), however this is like taking a piece of block and wrapping it with a marble looking paper, while it may looks similar to what marble, it had none of the characteristics; light did not reflect of it the way light reflects of marble, it was not transparent at certain points where marble might have been and so on. With the development of Renderman this was all possible with the incorporation of a physics-based means of defining how light reflects from surfaces called shade trees. Shade trees worked by allowing the artist to program the look of each individual surface. An example of this is Luxo Jr, which had a separate program for every surface in the scene, IE: the metallic lamps, the woody floor and the plastic ball, thus allowing for light to reflect differently of each surface.
