Pixar published a lot of great, groundbreaking graphics papers in their early days. (They still do, but as the field is more mature now there's a lot more backg

Pixar published a lot of great, groundbreaking graphics papers in their early days. (They still do, but as the field is more mature now there's a lot more background reading required.) For example, I think this one on their rendering pipeline REYES (Render Everything You Ever Saw) is pretty readable, and gives a great overview of how they rendered stuff like Red's Dream, in the years leading up to Toy Story: http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Reyes/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Reyes/paper.pdf (Edit to add: in fact, just check out the overviews at http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ which are much better than I can describe here)