Pixar Animation Studios Underscores Industry Leadership with New and Accelerated RenderMan® Pro Server

EMERYVILLE, CA – (May 2nd, 2005)  Responding to the rapidly increasing performance demands of cinematic quality imagery, Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq: PIXR) today announced the release of version 12.5 of its award winning RenderMan Pro Server software. In this release, RenderMan ray-tracing speed has been optimized to unprecedented levels, lengthening its industry lead as the renderer of choice in the majority of movies and visual effects sequences in current production.

Continually upgraded and production tested, key features of RenderMan Pro Server v12.5 include accelerated ray tracing, support for hierarchical subdivision surfaces, an API to read and write point cloud files, ray tracing visibility and shading attribute simplification, and many other improvements and optimizations.

"The upcoming Walt Disney Pictures presentation of a Pixar Animation Studios film Cars would not be possible without the features in RenderMan Pro Server v12.5," said Eben Ostby, supervising technical director at Pixar Animation Studios. "Pixar Director John Lasseter has created a world in Cars with an incredible amount of detail and subtlety. We’re pushing the look of the film in ways that require a much greater magnitude of geometric detail than we’ve used in previous movies, and RenderMan’s ability to handle this is extraordinary."

"With the release v12.5, RenderMan has become a mature ray tracer and we have seen speed gains of up to three times on some of our scenes," said Christoph Hery, R&D lead engineer at Industrial Light & Magic. "The ray-tracing interface is very consistent and offers finer control. As an added bonus, the new implementation of hierarchical subdivision surfaces has greatly eased our geometry pipeline as it allows sub object material assignment and texturing without resorting to splitting."

"I can’t get over how fast the ray-tracer is," said Chris Bone, head of R&D at Animal Logic. "It’s slinging incredible numbers of rays around in no time!"

Pricing and Availability 

RenderMan Pro Server v12.5 is available for US $3,500 per license. Upgrade pricing from RenderMan Pro Server v12.0 is US $1,050, and RenderMan Pro Server v11.5 or earlier for US $1,750. In addition, Pixar’s maintenance program benefits customers with access to ongoing support and upgrades for an annual fee. For more information visit www.pixar.com or contact rendermansales@pixar.com

About Pixar Animation Studios 

Pixar Animation Studios combines creative and technical artistry to create original stories in the medium of computer animation. Pixar has created six of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar has won 18 Academy Awards® and its six films have grossed more than $3.2 billion at the worldwide box office to date. The Northern California studio will release its next film, Cars, on June 9, 2006.