Loren Carpenter


Loren Clayton Carpenter was an American computer graphics researcher and developer.

Life and career

Carpenter was born in Brighton, Michigan, on February 7, 1947.
He was a co-founder and chief scientist of Pixar Animation Studios. Carpenter was the inventor of the Reyes rendering algorithm and one of the authors of the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which implements Reyes and renders all of Pixar's movies. Following Disney's acquisition of Pixar, Carpenter became a senior research scientist at Disney Research. He retired in early 2014.
In around 1967 Carpenter began work at Boeing Computer Services in Seattle, Washington. During his time there Carpenter studied for a B.S. in mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science, both from the University of Washington. Some of his work concerned using computer technology to improve Boeing's mechanical design processes, which were still entirely done by hand on paper.
On July 14, 1980, he gave a presentation at the SIGGRAPH conference, in which he showed "Vol Libre", a 2-minute computer generated movie. This showcased his software for generating and rendering fractally generated landscapes, and was met with a standing ovation, and he was immediately invited to work at Lucasfilm's Computer Division. There Carpenter worked on the "genesis effect" scene of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which featured an entire fractally-landscaped planet.
He and his wife Rachel founded Cinematrix, a company that researches computer-assisted interactive audience participation.
Carpenter invented the A-buffer hidden surface determination algorithm.
The PXR24 compression scheme used in Industrial Light & Magic's Open EXR file format is based on Carpenter's work.
In 2006 made improvements to the popular Mersenne Twister random number generator.
As of 2022 Carpenter was working with Ostrich Air Inc and FireBot Labs Inc as a Private Investor and Technical Consultant for their Fully Autonomous AI Driven Fire Fighting Drone Platform.
Carpenter died on December 21, 2025, at the age of 78.
From an interview published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Nov.-Dec 2025:

Q: What lessons learned would you like to share?
I followed my passion. I paid attention to the world around me and came back to anything that I found excited me. I had a hell of a lot of fun.

Computer animation