Pixar’s got some nice news this week for SIGGRAPH, the release of RenderMan for Maya 5.0 coming up this fall. It’s got lots of the new features from RenderMan Pro Server 16 and a few new ones as well.
RenderMan for Maya 5.0 showcases fundamental advancements in RenderMan’s ray tracing technology, including a new ray tracing hider, a radiosity cache, and physically plausible shading. In combination these new features allow artists to take full advantage of today’s high performance multi-core architectures and create photorealistic images with minimal setup, all within the artist-friendly user interface of RenderMan for Maya. Additionally, the process of shading and lighting has been dramatically accelerated with new lighting tools, including the robust re-rendering technology used in Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, as well as progressive ray-traced re-rendering for real time look development.
RenderMan for Maya 5.0 will be available for only $995, but a new student package will be available for $199/year along with some nice free Courseware educational material.
The latest release of Caedium (v2.4) can now create high-quality movies, where each frame can be rendered by either POV-Ray or a Renderman-compliant renderer, such as Aqsis. Further, multiple frames can be rendered in parallel, either on a standalone multi-core computer or on a cluster running Windows HPC Server 2008. The ability to run high-quality renderers in parallel means it’s never been easier or faster to create great looking movies of your Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results with Caedium
I’m somewhat surprised it only runs on WindowsHPCServer, most high-end HPC environments I know are still Linux-based. Nonetheless, support for Renderman-compliant renderers is a big win, and I look forward to seeing who does it next :)
Pixar has just announced a new price for the RenderMan Pro Server software, dropping it an incredible 40% to only $2,000 per license (with additional discounts when buying multiple licenses). In addition, annual maintenance has dropped to $600 per license per year.
“RenderMan Pro Server’s new price adapts to the ever increasing scale of rendering requirements and is the largest adjustment in many years” said Chris Ford, RenderMan Business Director at Pixar Animation Studios, “RenderMan’s quality is now even more accessible to anyone aspiring to create the highest levels of cinematic imagery, and we look forward to seeing what our customers will produce next.”
Renderman Studio and the Maya Integration features remain at their original prices. Full details after the break.
Fans of Renderman have a new version to love, RenderMan Studio 3.0. It has the usual performance boosts and UI improvements, but of particular note is the new consolidated user interface features and improved SLIM integration. In fact, the new SLIM integration even has scripting via MTOR-style and TCL. But that’s not all:
Better Intergration with Slim – RFM’s integration with Slim has been improved:
Slim sessions now “travel” with Maya scene files.
Bind Slim shaders to Maya nodes without the use of Maya ShadingGroup Nodes.
Hierarchical binding via the Maya DAG is now supported. A new binding strength attribute allows you to override lower-level bindings at higher DAG levels.
Slim can now initiate preview renders in Maya.
Slim networks can now generally imply extra rendering passes.
Beginning as a single lonely chapter in GPU Gems 2, Michael Bunnel’s chapter on real-time occlusion without ray-tracing became a revolutionary new rendering technology (Read his chapter online). His point-cloud algorithms enabled a faster, more accurate rendering that was of great interest to Pixar, and Per Christensen integrated it into their Renderman tool. An article on CGSociety chronicles the effort.
During early stages, Christensen worked with Sony’s Rene Limberger who integrated point-based rendering on pre-production tests for Surf’s Up. Christensen further refined these techniques with ILM’s Christophe Hery who applied these methods to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. It quickly became apparent that these techniques had major implications for feature film rendering. Bunnell's single chapter had kicked off a minor revolution in CGI for feature film, point-based rendering.
An interesting new piece of freely available software allows you to load point clouds from Pixar’s Renderman into Maya for visualization. You can download the source & binaries from their website.
Pixar has announced some new changes in RenderMan including some new tools like RenderMan Pro Server 15 and Tractor 1.0. Most importantly, new versions of RenderMan (Starting with Pro Server 15.0) will have support for unlimited threads, meaning that pricing is no longer dependent on the core count, but on the node count.
Unlimited threading will enable studios and artists to maximize the power of their render farms, allowing each license of RenderMan to utilize any number of threads on the latest multi-core platforms. RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 will be the first product to introduce unlimited threading when it is released in the fall of 2009. This will be followed with unlimited threading for RenderMan Studio and RenderMan for Maya.
JourneyEd, purveyor of high-end software packages to educational institutions worldwide, has added another package to its shelves just in time for SIGGRAPH: Pixar’s Renderman.
“JourneyEd is thrilled to become Pixar’s connection to the education market,” said JourneyEd’s Chief Executive Officer, Michael Fischler. “RenderMan is the software that Pixar uses to create not only its own Academy Award®-winning animated films, but is also used to render the bulk of visual effects seen in today’s movies. We are delighted that student artists can now access this coveted professional resource among our animation software offerings at a highly attractive price.”
RenderMan® is now available to the education community through JourneyEd at special academic prices, as low as $125 for an annual student subscription, at www.JourneyEd.com.
JourneyEd and Renderman will both be at SIGGRAPH2009 for conference attendees to check out.
G-Force, the story of a secret paramilitary group of guinea pigs and other animals, hits theaters soon and ImageWorks sits down with Resource411 to talk about the work.
While the animators developed the skeletal rigging and basic geometry of the movement and background, the visual effects team was building additional layers upon the animation. Using programs like Maya, Arnold, Houdini and Renderman, the textural reality of the movement and lighting of the many layers of fur on the guinea pigs was developed.
The movie is technically interesting on several levels because often times it’s a completely CG-generated foreground on top of a live-action background, reverse of most films. Also, it’s in “Digital 3D”, which adds alot of extra work to any film.
One interesting new transformer revealed as a Decepticon in the new Transformers 2 movie is the “MicroCon”, thousands of plague-infected ball bearings that reassemble into a new transformer. The work was done by Digital Domain
, and they discuss it over at millimeter.
“Our 3D background was created in Nuke,” says DD CG Supervisor Paul Palop (referring to the software developed at Digital Domain and now sold by The Foundry). Because thousands of ball bearings were so close to the floor in this shot, Palop’s team had to pay additional attention to the way the 3D CG floor was constructed and rendered. For that, DD used Autodesk Maya and Pixar RenderMan.
Pixar’s got some nice news this week for SIGGRAPH, the release of RenderMan for Maya 5.0 coming up this fall. It’s got lots of the new features from RenderMan Pro Server 16 and a few new ones as well.
The latest release of Caedium (v2.4) can now create high-quality movies, where each frame can be rendered by either POV-Ray or a Renderman-compliant renderer, such as Aqsis. Further, multiple frames can be rendered in parallel, either on a standalone multi-core computer or on a cluster running Windows HPC Server 2008. The ability to run high-quality renderers in parallel means it’s never been easier or faster to create great looking movies of your Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results with Caedium
Pixar has just announced a new price for the RenderMan Pro Server software, dropping it an incredible 40% to only $2,000 per license (with additional discounts when buying multiple licenses). In addition, annual maintenance has dropped to $600 per license per year.
Fans of Renderman have a new version to love, RenderMan Studio 3.0. It has the usual performance boosts and UI improvements, but of particular note is the new consolidated user interface features and improved SLIM integration. In fact, the new SLIM integration even has scripting via MTOR-style and TCL. But that’s not all:
Beginning as a single lonely chapter in 
An interesting new piece of freely available software allows you to load point clouds from Pixar’s Renderman into Maya for visualization. You can download the source & binaries from their website.
Pixar has announced some new changes in RenderMan including some new tools like RenderMan Pro Server 15 and Tractor 1.0. Most importantly, new versions of RenderMan (Starting with Pro Server 15.0) will have support for unlimited threads, meaning that pricing is no longer dependent on the core count, but on the node count.
JourneyEd, purveyor of high-end software packages to educational institutions worldwide, has added another package to its shelves just in time for SIGGRAPH: Pixar’s Renderman.
VizWorld.com 
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