I doubt you spent as much time as I did reading Siggraph papers in the late eighties and nineties. Today's rendering hardware and software algorithms largely exist due to the pioneering research done twenty plus years ago. VALVe's own game rendering engine is a byproduct of research which began at Utah, then extended to Cornell and other places, and then to private firms such as SGI and LucasFilm.
RenderMan was not created for that movie (Toy Story). It was created in the eighties to make movies (plural).
Once you remove the hardware technicians to create a network of rendering nodes, and remove the cost to pay for famous voice talent, what are you left with? Well, a lot. The first thing you need to understand is, first person gaming has benefited heavily from the research done over the past 50 years, of which the very talented team that ultimately became a part of Pixar are significantly responsible. That's the first thing you're ignoring. What else? Concept artists, storyboarders, modelers, riggers, shader writers, procedural geometry coders, texture artists, set designers, animators, lighters, directors, cinematographers, producers, on location research, general research and development, etc.
Take a look at the credits the next time you watch a Pixar movie. I honestly don't know if you're ignoring this out of genuine ignorance, of because it's convenient for you to do so. I made a post about animators. Care to address it?
No, I don't care to address it. I'll assume that you are correct in whole, since you seem much more versed in this particular topic than I. It's still irrelevent.
It does not immediately become irrelevant because you wish to no longer address the cost of making a film, or the history that lies behind the cost of developing said technology. Also, you might want to note that the
The Abyss, released in 1989, used RenderMan and the RenderMan Shading Language. Toy Story was released in 1995. Here is a very large list of films which used RenderMan:
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/whats_renderman/movies.htmlThe reason it is relevant is because the costs of creating something matter. Oh, and regarding the Pixar animators? Each animator may take more than a year to create two minutes of animation - and that footage may not even appear in the final film. Typically each animator gets assigned just a minute or two in a feature length film. That's just animating. That is not modeling, texturing, shader writing, rigging, lighting, directing, etc.
Think about that. A one minute sequence of Mr. Incredible engaging in some action (one minute!) may take half a year of tweaking by an animator to get the eye movements down, the finger movements, etc.
Even if Toy Story couldn't have ever been made, the pragmatic argument does not change the fact of the matter that IP is not property, and thus IP laws are violations of real property rights. If you sell me a DVD of your latest work, and we do not have any agreement otherwise, you have no right to prevent me from doing whatever I wish to my property. My property is the physical DVD, your animations are just data. If we have an agreement that I won't buy the DVD and then share your data, I'm bound by different laws and different principles. But there is no such thing as an agreement that I'm bound to simply reason of opening a package.
When you buy a DVD, you have entered into a contract. The intended use is clearly stated on the packaging, and you can make a choice then and there to either buy or not buy. Nobody is forcing you to buy.
