In 2001 I was hired as an animator for Harry Potter II, but the animation rig wasn't ready so I was assigned to James Bond to write RenderMan code. Never having used PRMan or SLIM before it was a good challenge.

My task was to write shaders for water and ice, without using raytracing. I developed a technique for subsurface scattering using depth maps for the icebergs. Little did I know of Henrik Wann Jensen and Steve Marschner's newly released Siggraph paper. And for the water I developed a technique for reflection/refraction using a pre-pass render.

With the advent of point clouds, neither technique is of much use today.  Though they might come in handy for realtime applications.