A History of 3D Rendering

Rendering is the art of turning numbers into an image. This timeline follows it year by year, from a light pen at MIT to neural networks running inside shaders, with the people, papers, films and chips that moved it forward.

The Pioneers (1963-1979)

Everything starts in university labs, mostly in Utah and at MIT, with problems that still define the field: what is visible, what colour is it, where does the light go.

1. 1963
   Sketchpad

   Ivan Sutherland's MIT thesis: the first interactive graphics program, drawn with a light pen. The same year Larry Roberts shows how to remove hidden lines from 3D solids.

2. 1968
   Ray casting

   Arthur Appel (IBM) shades solids by shooting a ray from the eye through each pixel. It is the seed of every ray tracer that follows.

3. 1970
   Scan-line rendering

   Bouknight and Watkins (Utah) solve visibility one horizontal line at a time. It is fast enough to be practical, and it stays the workhorse for years.

4. 1971
   Gouraud shading

   Henri Gouraud interpolates colour across a polygon from its vertices. Curved surfaces now look smooth with very few polygons.

5. 1972
   A Computer Animated Hand

   Ed Catmull and Fred Parke animate a digitised model of Catmull's own hand: one of the earliest 3D computer animation films.

6. 1974
   Z-buffer and texture mapping

   Catmull's thesis brings a depth value per pixel and images wrapped onto surfaces (Wolfgang Straßer proposes the depth buffer independently). The Z-buffer is still in every GPU.

7. 1975
   Phong shading and the Utah teapot

   Bui Tuong Phong interpolates normals per pixel and adds a specular highlight model. Martin Newell models a teapot that becomes the field's test object.

8. 1976-1978
   Reflection, bump and shadow maps

   Blinn and Newell introduce reflection mapping (1976), Blinn adds bump mapping (1978), and Lance Williams publishes shadow mapping (1978). Cheap tricks, all still in use.

9. 1977
   The Death Star trench

   Star Wars includes a few seconds of vector wireframe computer graphics by Larry Cuba: CG reaches the cinema screen.

The Age of Photorealism (1980-1989)

The maths of light transport gets written down. Most of what a modern renderer does is defined in this decade, long before the hardware can run it.

1. 1980
   Recursive ray tracing

   Turner Whitted (Bell Labs) follows rays through mirrors and glass, adding reflections, refractions and shadows to one algorithm. A single image takes hours.

2. 1981
   Silicon Graphics

   Jim Clark and colleagues found SGI around the Geometry Engine. Its workstations dominate professional 3D for about fifteen years.

3. 1982
   Tron and the Genesis sequence

   Tron mixes CG and live action, and Lucasfilm's computer division makes the Genesis Effect for Star Trek II: fractal terrain and particle systems in a feature film.

4. 1984
   Radiosity and distributed ray tracing

   Goral and colleagues at Cornell borrow heat-transfer equations to compute diffuse light bouncing between surfaces. At Lucasfilm, Cook, Porter and Carpenter sample rays to get motion blur, depth of field and soft shadows.

5. 1986
   The rendering equation

   James Kajiya writes light transport as one integral and solves it by Monte Carlo sampling: path tracing. The same year, Pixar becomes an independent company.

6. 1987
   Reyes

   Cook, Carpenter and Catmull describe the Reyes architecture: surfaces diced into micropolygons, shaded, then sampled. It becomes the core of RenderMan.

7. 1988
   RenderMan and Tin Toy

   Pixar publishes the RenderMan Interface Specification. Tin Toy becomes the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award.

8. 1989
   The Abyss

   ILM's water pseudopod is a CG creature that sits convincingly in live-action footage, and the effects industry takes note.

Studios, Desktops and the First 3D Cards (1990-1999)

Film shows what CG can do while affordable software and consumer hardware put 3D in front of millions of people.

1. 1990
   3D Studio and LightWave

   Autodesk's 3D Studio on the PC and NewTek's LightWave on the Amiga (with the Video Toaster) make 3D production possible on a desktop budget.

2. 1991
   Terminator 2

   The liquid-metal T-1000 puts a morphing CG character in the middle of a live-action film.

3. 1992
   OpenGL 1.0 and Wolfenstein 3D

   SGI releases OpenGL, the first widely adopted cross-platform graphics API. On PCs, Wolfenstein 3D uses ray casting to draw corridors in real time.

4. 1993
   Doom and Jurassic Park

   Doom uses BSP trees and texture-mapped walls to run a convincing 3D-looking world on ordinary PCs. Jurassic Park shows photoreal CG animals in cinemas.

5. 1995
   Toy Story

   Pixar releases the first fully computer-animated feature film, rendered with RenderMan.

6. 1996
   Quake, 3dfx Voodoo, Direct3D and Houdini

   Quake is a real polygonal 3D engine with lightmaps. The 3dfx Voodoo card brings hardware acceleration to home PCs, and Microsoft ships Direct3D with DirectX 2. SideFX releases Houdini.

7. 1998
   Maya and Unreal

   Alias|Wavefront releases Maya, which becomes the studio standard for animation. Epic's Unreal ships with an editor and scripting, an early sign of the engine as a product.

8. 1999
   GeForce 256

   NVIDIA sells the GeForce 256 as the first "GPU": transform and lighting move from the CPU onto the graphics chip.

The Programmable Shader Era (2000-2009)

The fixed pipeline opens up. Artists and programmers can now write the code that shades every pixel.

1. 2001
   GeForce 3 and DirectX 8

   The first consumer GPU with programmable vertex and pixel shaders. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within attempts a fully photoreal CG cast.

2. 2002
   Cg, Radeon 9700 and Blender

   NVIDIA releases the Cg shading language and ATI's Radeon 9700 brings floating-point pixel shading. Blender becomes open source.

3. 2003
   OpenEXR

   ILM releases OpenEXR, a floating-point HDR image format that becomes the film industry's exchange standard.

4. 2004
   Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Far Cry

   Normal mapping and per-pixel lighting go mainstream: dynamic stencil shadows in Doom 3, physics and facial animation in Half-Life 2, lush outdoor vegetation in Far Cry.

5. 2005
   Unity

   Unity launches at Apple's developer conference as a Mac-only engine. Its low price and editor-first approach will open game development to a much wider crowd.

6. 2006
   Unified shaders and Arnold

   The GeForce 8800 unifies vertex and pixel processing into general-purpose shader cores. Monster House is the first feature rendered with the Arnold path tracer.

7. 2007
   CUDA and Crysis

   CUDA opens the GPU to general-purpose computing, and Crysis becomes the benchmark that brings gaming PCs to their knees.

8. 2008
   OpenCL

   The Khronos Group publishes OpenCL 1.0, a vendor-neutral answer to CUDA.

9. 2009
   Avatar

   Weta Digital's virtual camera and facial performance capture change how a CG world is directed and shot.

The PBR Revolution (2010-2017)

Studios and game developers converge on materials that obey energy conservation, so a metal looks like metal under any light.

1. 2010
   Physically-based shading courses

   The SIGGRAPH course on physically-based shading in film and game production sets a common vocabulary between the two worlds.

2. 2011
   Cycles and the Samaritan demo

   Blender gets Cycles, a path tracer. At GDC, Epic's Samaritan demo shows what the next generation of real-time lighting could look like.

3. 2012
   The Disney principled BRDF

   Brent Burley presents an artist-friendly material model with a handful of intuitive parameters. It is adopted across the industry within a few years.

4. 2013
   Monsters University

   Pixar moves to ray-traced global illumination for the first time, ending years of carefully placed fill lights.

5. 2014
   Unreal Engine 4, Big Hero 6 and Substance Painter

   UE4 ships with PBR as its default. Disney's Hyperion path tracer renders a whole feature. Substance Painter brings PBR texturing to a wide audience. The Academy also releases ACES 1.0 for colour management.

6. 2015
   Unity 5

   Unity 5 introduces a physically-based Standard Shader and real-time global illumination, making PBR the default for independent developers.

7. 2016
   Vulkan and OpenUSD

   Vulkan 1.0 gives low-level, cross-platform GPU control. Pixar open-sources Universal Scene Description, the format that will tie DCC tools and renderers together.

8. 2017
   MaterialX

   ILM open-sources MaterialX, a way to describe materials once and render them in any compatible engine.

Real-Time Ray Tracing and Neural Rendering (2018-today)

Ray tracing runs on consumer hardware, and machine learning starts to replace parts of the pipeline.

1. 2018
   RTX, DXR and Star Wars Reflections

   NVIDIA's Turing GPUs add dedicated ray-tracing cores and Microsoft ships the DXR API. Epic, ILMxLAB and NVIDIA show a ray-traced Star Wars scene at GDC, and Battlefield V becomes the first game with RTX reflections.

2. 2019
   Control, Quake II RTX and Eevee

   Control shows what combined ray-traced effects can add to a modern game, Quake II RTX runs fully path-traced, and Blender 2.80 introduces the real-time Eevee renderer.

3. 2020
   NeRF, Nanite and Karma

   Neural Radiance Fields reconstruct a scene from photos with a neural network. Epic's Lumen in the Land of Nanite demo runs on PlayStation 5, and SideFX brings its own Karma renderer to Houdini.

4. 2021
   Omniverse

   NVIDIA makes Omniverse generally available: a collaboration platform built on USD, with path-traced viewports.

5. 2022
   Unreal Engine 5 and Instant NeRF

   Unreal Engine 5.0 ships with Nanite virtualised geometry and Lumen dynamic global illumination. NVIDIA's Instant NeRF cuts training from hours to seconds, and DLSS 3 adds AI frame generation.

6. 2023
   Gaussian Splatting and full path tracing

   3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs and renders captured scenes in real time. Cyberpunk 2077 adds a full path-tracing mode, DLSS 3.5 denoises rays with AI, and the Alliance for OpenUSD is founded.

7. 2025
   Neural shaders in hardware

   NVIDIA's RTX 50 series exposes small neural networks to shader code, so materials and textures can be compressed or approximated by learned models.

Current Industry Standards

For the techniques behind these milestones, see The Evolution of Rendering Techniques; for the studio and hardware side, Pixar, NVIDIA and SideFX: 30 Years of Rendering Technology.