Responding to the rapidly increasing performance demands of cinematic quality imagery, Pixar Animation Studios announced the release of version 12.5 of its award-winning RenderMan Pro Server software.
Key features of RenderMan Pro Server v12.5 include accelerated ray tracing, support for hierarchical subdivision surfaces, an API to read and write point cloud files, ray tracing visibility and shading attribute simplification and many other improvements and optimizations.
"The upcoming Walt Disney Pictures presentation of a Pixar Animation Studios film, CARS, would not be possible without the features in RenderMan Pro Server v12.5," said Eben Ostby, supervising technical director at Pixar Animation Studios. "Director John Lasseter has created a world in CARS with an incredible amount of detail and subtlety. Were pushing the look of the film in ways that require a much greater magnitude of geometric detail than weve used in previous movies, and RenderMans ability to handle this is extraordinary."
"With the release v12.5, RenderMan has become a mature ray tracer and we have seen speed gains of up to three times on some of our scenes," added Christoph Hery, R&D lead engineer at Industrial Light & Magic. "The ray-tracing interface is very consistent and offers finer control. As an added bonus, the new implementation of hierarchical subdivision surfaces has greatly eased our geometry pipeline as it allows sub object material assignment and texturing without resorting to splitting."
"I cant get over how fast the ray-tracer is," said Chris Bone, head of R&D at Animal Logic. "Its slinging incredible numbers of rays around in no time."
RenderMan Pro Server v12.5 is available for $3,500 per license. Upgrade pricing from RenderMan Pro Server v12.0 is $1,050, and RenderMan Pro Server v11.5 or earlier for $1,750. In addition, Pixars maintenance program benefits customers with access to ongoing support and upgrades for an annual fee.
Emeryville-California-based Pixar Animation Studios (www.pixar.com) combines creative and technical artistry to create original stories in the medium of computer animation. Pixar has created six of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: TOY STORY, A BUG'S LIFE, TOY STORY 2, MONSTERS, INC., FINDING NEMO and THE INCREDIBLES. Pixar has won 18 Academy Awards and its six films have grossed more than $3.2 billion at the worldwide box office to date. Disney/Pixar will release CARS on June 9, 2006.