New Pricing for RenderMan Pro Server
RenderMan Pro Server, a new software package featuring an upgraded version of Pixar Animation Studios' RenderMan 3D rendering software (version 11.5), will be released in July, 2003 and repriced at $3,500. The new release showcases increased rendering performance indicative of the studio's recent work with FINDING NEMO. Complex scenes using subtle lighting effects should see significant gains, and a new rendering mode boosts throughput by automatically harnessing the full power of modern multi-processor systems.
Pixar's RenderMan Pro Server Components:* PRMan, Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan renderer. * Irma, shading and lighting development re-rendering tool. * AlfServer, enables distributed parallel rendering on server farms and idle desktops. * Additional utilities formerly bundled in the RenderMan toolkit.
New Features in RenderMan 11.5:* Multi-processor rendering allows multiple CPUs on the same machine to work on the same frame in parallel for faster throughput. * Sub-sample resolution z-stencil buffers enable new types of geometry blending and clipping effects. * Aggressive acceleration. * Sophisticated improvements in scene analysis which substantially reduce the time spent in shader execution for scenes with highly complex geometry and shaders. * New algorithms dramatically accelerate indirect illumination, ambient occlusion and other effects associated with global illumination. * The shader compiler performs significant new code analysis to improve memory usage and rendering performance. New Enhancements: * The quality of indirect illumination and ambient occlusion has been improved, especially for animation. * Particle effects render faster and with fewer artifacts due to improved RiPoints. * Motion blur has been enhanced for fast moving objects in scenes with a high depth of field. * Subdivision surfaces handle textures more accurately due to "facevarying" interpolation improvements. * "Deep Shadow" improvements. * More efficient for larger images. * New API for custom control.
For more information about RenderMan, including product descriptions and price lists, please visit www.pixar.com.