Thu 14th Jun 2012 | News
Pixar announces RenderMan Studio 4.0
In this announcement from Pixar about their RenderMan range, there are several portions of information, most notably RenderMan for Maya will now be part of RenderMan Studio, so there'll be a single package for CGI artists.
Secondly, there is a change (downwards) in price. RenderMan Studio is now available at US$1,300 (with an internal renderer) to be made effective immediately.
And Third, the upcoming summer release of RMS 4.0 is going to have a rich feature set based on RPS 17.0.
RenderMan Studio 4.0 also introduces the latest rendering technology developed for the forthcoming RenderMan Pro Server 17.0, and showcases significant advancements in ray tracing for multi-bounce global illumination and ray-traced subsurface scattering, including a system of physically plausible shaders directly integrated into Maya and the Slim shader editor. With these new features, artists can maximize today's high performance multi-core architectures to create photorealistic images with minimal setup within the user interface of Maya. The process of shading and lighting setup has also been dramatically accelerated with new lighting tools, including the robust re-rendering technology used in Cars 2 and Brave as well as progressive ray-traced re-rendering for rapid look development.
With additional new capabilities such as Dynamic Shader Binding, expanded RIB archiving, and a new library of RenderMan materials for Maya, RenderMan Studio 4.0 is the result of the feedback from numerous VFX productions allowing Maya artists to easily create photorealistic images at the highest levels of cinematic quality in a comprehensive solution that can be configured to accommodate any VFX pipeline.
Also, Pixar has redesigned the website renderman.pixar.com with a new look and new content, reflecting our latest product changes. Pixar has now integrated the RenderMan courseware into renderman.pixar.com to create RenderMan University. This extensive knowledgebase is a great place to learn how RenderMan is used in VFX production today.
RenderMan Studio 4.0 is compatible with Maya 2013 and earlier versions on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Upgrade pricing from RenderMan Studio 3.0 is available and existing RenderMan for Maya customers can upgrade to RenderMan Studio 4.0 for the same price as previous RenderMan for Maya upgrades. Student pricing is also available.
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