Sony isn’t the only animation company out there who is spreading around the software wealth. According to AWN, Pixar has some new releases of their patented software RenderMan. Due to the amount of CG in today’s movie fare, RenderMan has become a staple for render farm production and management.
Pixar’s release is three-fold: new unlimited threading across all RenderMan products enabling studios to maximize each license usage on to use any number of threads, the release of RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 with many new rendering capabilities including memory management, true volume primitives, and a pumped up RenderMan Shader Language; and the release of Tractor 1.0, a high-powered, multi-core render farm management solution.
“With RenderMan Pro Server 15.0, Pixar has changed the way we approach volumetric phenomena.” said Rob Pieke, R&D Lead at The Moving Picture Company. “Thanks to direct support for volume rendering and color bleeding, we have been able to greatly simplify our work-flow for rendering dust, spray, smoke and fire, while enhancements to the implicit field sampling allow us to produce images faster than ever.”
With these releases, studios can create faster, more efficient render farms, and movie-goers can expect even more realistic special effects and detailed visual productions.
