Just some Corrections.

Pixar gave up making hardware after four years. and started on Animations.

It took them 3 yrs to to come up with a successful 3D movie (Toy Story) not 20 (true 3D technology is barely 20 yrs old. What you thought was 3D around that time was clever use of 2D projections to give illusions of 3D.

It was Disney that held the key to Pixars continuity as they gave pixar the distribuion advantage of Toy STory without which they would have closed shop... but nooooooo give credit to Jobs

Pixar is not a player in the Gaming Industry, Game Industry Players are Epic games (Unreal) and Id Software (Id Tech 5), Ubisoft (Dunia), Crytech. And a few other propriet engines. These guys have the best 3D Engines and these are the real pushers of 3D technology together with hardware vendors such as Nvidia and ATI without which Pixars techology would be useless. The effects that the renderers can do rely on the hardware.

What Engine did others buy? Pixar does not have a 3D Engine for licence... Marionette is propriety abd secret... what about Renderman? It is a renderer. Thats the only one they licence. It runs as a pluggin on other software Like Maya or 3Ds (Ask any animators or modelers these two apps both developed by Autodesk are the industry standards. Pixar uses them too). Btw all 3D houses use propriety tools/plugins and scripts developed in-house. This is what gives them an edge over their competition.

Pixar didnt giveany body anything, infact its pixar uses their software and buids plugins and scripts just like ILM and the rest. Renderman usually runs as a plugin on top of Maya, 3Ds and other modelling tools. If it didnt it would not work

In short, Pixar is highly successful as a content provider. They have really talented artists and writers and financial muscle with Disney as the daddy... oh of course their in-house developers are really smart too.

Your points are thoroughly understood

----- "ndungu stephen" <ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
> It took Pixar 20 years to make a successful 3D software and hardware environment - to become profitable .. all thanks to investors like Steve Jobs who had extra cash to keep a 'good invention alive, but a loss making venture non-the-less'

The others seeing the success, just bought the engine and proceeded from there; cutting down 20 years of a research - to create 3D environments, films and games..

Of course, Pixar could not give them everything - so these other companies had to figure some things out.

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When Ford, Mercedez and the rest came up with the vehicle engine, and the overall design of the car i.e the driver seat, co-driver seat, the passenger seats, the four wheels.. etc
Companies like Toyota took it up from the basic and earlier design, of a hydrocarbon engine  - without going through the 100 yrs of steam engines and experiments preceding the first successful engine deployment.

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In order to reach the skies, you are either a giant - and if not, you may need to step on the shoulders of giants.

>
> 12 cents.
>
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