My entry for this year's Pixar's Renderman Art Challenge made it to the sixth place, among the honorable mentions. I was surrounded by amazing entries, all of the artists have been so creative and magical!

The theme was "SciTech" and I had the chance to use the Pixar Image Computer model to tell a story. So, I decided to represent the first Pixar creative spark, when technology merged with art to create the first 3d animated movie in history.
The concept for my image was the following:

"It’s 1986 and a robot is selling software and hardware in a shopping mall. It watches other artists buying its products to make art and it wonders what it feels like to be creative, to tell a story and not just sell stuff.
While cleaning up, right after the store closes, suddenly it sees a claw machine full of toys and starts playing with it, trying to grab one of the items placed on the top of the bunch. Finally, it can grab this little yellow and blue ball with a red star on it. Its monitor lights up: it found its creative spark."

The assets available for this challenge made me think of how much technology and art merged together to create the biggest animation studio ever, and with this image I wanted a make a little tribute to the Pixar origin story.
With the computer model provided, I built a robot modeling the body except for the head. All the other assets have been modeled in 3ds Max and textured in Substance Painter.
The layout, lighting, look development and rendering were done in Blender with Renderman.

I wanna thank all the amazing Pixar artists who gave us feedbacks along the way: challenges like this are a great way to explore ideas and learn new things, and I can't wait for the next one!

You can see all the finalists here: https://renderman.pixar.com/news/renderman-scitech-art-challenge-final-results