New Rendering Technologies at SIGGRAPH 2017

Pixar Animation Studios Showcases New Rendering Technologies at SIGGRAPH 2017

Special Previews of Live Rendering and a CPU + GPU Solution Accompany the Announcement of RenderMan 21.5

Emeryville, CA – (August 2nd 2017)  Pixar Animation Studios today gave a special preview of upcoming technologies at the 2017 RenderMan Art & Science Fair, including new interactive capabilities for RenderMan 22 and work on “XPU” rendering using CPU+GPU cores together. Demonstrations of RenderMan 21.5 showcased break-through technologies for rendering CGI characters, including state-of-the-art skin and hair developed for Pixar production. Presentations from Pixar and ILM revealed how feature films such as Cars 3, Coco, and Rogue One drive enhancements to RenderMan's core technology.

-Damien Fagnou, CTO at MPC Film

RenderMan 21.5, released July 26th, contains significant new features like “Path Traced Subsurface Scattering”, the most advanced technique for skin and soft materials available for production VFX. New artistic controls add to RenderMan’s industry-leading hair and fur, providing a wide range of new effects. This latest version delivers raw rendering performance gains on scenes with thousands of light sources, or complex combinations of mesh lights, hair and fur, volumetrics, and arbitrary outputs. The updated Denoiser enables new compositing workflows and is substantially faster due to advanced code optimizations. RenderMan 21.5 delivers UI simplification and workflow improvements for secondary passes, holdouts, material presets, and deep compositing.

“Artists here at MPC were able to use RenderMan to push the boundaries of complexity and realism in films like The Jungle Book,” said Damien Fagnou, CTO at MPC Film. “These new 21.5 features are helping us crash through those boundaries again on the next generation of projects.”

Pixar demonstrated several next-generation technologies at the event including a preview of next year’s RenderMan 22. It features “always-on” rendering embedded in artist applications, responding instantly to geometry, camera, light and material edits. This new live rendering mode delivers incredible interactive frame rates with the same renderer used for batch renders. Other RenderMan 22 technologies like fast vectorized OSL shader network evaluation on Intel scalable-SIMD CPUs were also shown.

-Steve May, Pixar CTO

Finally, Pixar unveiled RenderMan XPU, a combined CPU + GPU solution now under development. The XPU technology renders on both CPUs and GPUs concurrently, taking full advantage of workstation resources. RenderMan XPU was shown live on a production scene, demonstrating the power and artistic possibilities of this upcoming technology. More information on RenderMan XPU will become available closer to delivery, scheduled after RenderMan 22.

"RenderMan 22 is looking phenomenal," said Steve May, Pixar CTO. “The speed of creative iteration is critical to our artists. I am excited to see what they will do with a truly live, next-gen RenderMan in their hands. They will be able to refine artistic decisions faster and explore a wider range of possibilities while doing it. It's a great example of RenderMan innovating around the needs of production and feeding new creative tools back to artists.”

Availability

RenderMan 21.5 is available for download today at renderman.pixar.com - Customers on annual maintenance can immediately begin using this major update. New purchases are $495 each for permanent licenses, with volume discounts and short-term loan options available. Researchers and non-commercial users can access Educational Grants and single-user Non-Commercial RenderMan, free of charge. Contact RenderMan Sales rendermansales@pixar.com for more information or to receive a quote.

About Pixar Animation Studios

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renowned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation.  The Northern California studio has created some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc.," “Cars,” "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille," "WALL•E," "Up," "Toy Story 3,” “Brave,” and “Inside Out.” Its movies have won 32 Academy Awards® and have grossed more than $10 billion at the worldwide box office to date. “Cars 3,” Pixar’s 18th feature, opened in theaters on June 16, 2017.