Pixar Animation Studios has released version 16.0 of its Oscar-winning RenderMan Pro Server software. The new release offers innovative advancements in ray tracing technology, including a new ray tracing hider, a radiosity cache and physically plausible shading. These features allow RenderMan to take full advantage of the ever-increasing processing power of multi-core architectures, while also delivering the tools to implement these new features with efficiency and elegance. The software’s new progressive ray tracing provides interactive re-rendering for production shading and lighting.
RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 unveils new deep compositing features for post production, while continuing to advance Pixar’s award-winning point-based rendering technology with full support for spherical harmonics, enhanced threading scalability, and accelerated baseline performance. Along with many other features, such as vector textures and more realistic motion blur, RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 delivers many production-proven features and cutting edge innovations. It also introduces a free downloadable library to help the computer graphics community take full advantage of Pixar’s file formats in the cause of promoting open standards including a C++ binding for RIB and access to Deep Textures, with additional formats forthcoming.
“RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 fulfills every need on our feature request list. It lets us focus on the customizations we really care about for ray tracing physically-correct lighting in the cleanest way possible,” said Dan Evans, Head of Shaders at Framestore, London. “The speed of the new radiosity cache makes ray-traced global illumination practical in a single render pass, and we can now refine our test frames live using the new progressive ray tracing. Multi-bounce glossy specular, importance sampling, area shadows, and direct lighting are now a breeze thanks to the renderer supporting them all directly. Better still, regular ray tracing is staggeringly faster at 8X on some of our more complex stereo renders.”
RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 is compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, 64-bit Linux, and 64-bit Microsoft Windows variants. Additional platforms may be included as demand requires. Maintenance including support and automatic upgrades is available. Full evaluation copies of RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 are available upon request. For assistance concerning sales, maintenance, operating system compatibility, evaluation licenses, or any other questions about Pixar’s RenderMan, please contact rendermansales@pixar.com or visit www.pixar.com.
Here is a clip from the RenderMan display at SIGGRAPH 2010:
