(Source: VFXWorld) Pixar Animation Studios made three major product announcements to users of the studios’ Academy Award-winning RenderMan software and to every artist and studio creating cinematic quality imagery. The first announcement is unlimited threading across all RenderMan Products, the second is the upcoming release of RenderMan Pro Server 15.0, and the third is Tractor 1.0, Pixar’s new render management solution engineered for computing networks of unprecedented scale.

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.

The forthcoming RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 is a key component of Pixar’s core rendering technology and introduces several powerful new capabilities, including true volume primitives, major additions to the RenderMan Shader Language (RSL), Disney’s Ptex per face painted textures, imager shaders, an API for subdivision surfaces, and more. This release will also include significant performance enhancements for rendering production scenes, including optimized memory management and improved thread scalability.
