Pixar Animation Studios released RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 and RenderMan Studio 4.0, upgrading its Academy-Award-winning rendering software renowned as the industry standard for the highest quality animation and photorealistic visual effects. Amongst many powerful feature highlights, RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 includes significant performance gains including object instancing, photon mapping enhancements, and volume-rendering optimizations. RenderMan Studio 4.0 features include a new physically plausible shader library allowing Maya users to intuitively focus on the creation of photorealistic imagery, with an emphasis on artist-friendly out-of-the-box workflows. Both new releases are the result of an enormous collaborative effort combining the insight of the world's premier visual effects studios with Pixar's rendering development expertise. RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 is $2,000 US per license with volume discounts available for render farm purchases. RenderMan Studio 4.0 is $1,300 US per license and compatible with Maya 2013 on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X systems. Upgrade pricing from RenderMan Studio 3.0 and the former RenderMan for Maya is available upon request. A student bundle consisting of both RenderMan Studio 4.0 and RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 is available for $200 US. [source]

Luxology's NPR Kit for modo, a non-photorealistic rendering package that allows expressive, hand-drawn looks and animations to be achieved in 3D renderings, has been released. With this new all-in-one kit, modo 601 users will now be able to access classic art styles when rendering anything from product visualizations to anime and fine art. NPR Kit can mimic traditional styles like blueprints, sketches and chalk drawings, using one of the included eight shaders, pre-built materials, still and animated backgrounds, sample NPR scenes, Sketchmaps, and tutorials. The NPR Kit is available immediately for use with modo 601 on both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems for a suggested retail price of $199 US. The NPR Kit is currently offered for $149 for a limited time and can be purchased thru authorized Luxology resellers or on Luxology's website. [source]

Pixar Animation Studios' RenderMan team presents new insights at SIGGRAPH 2012 into its very latest rendering technologies, including upcoming releases of RenderMan Studio 4.0 and RenderMan Pro Server 17.0, along with live demonstrations of RenderMan On Demand, Pixar's new cloud rendering service. Emphasizing the versatility and performance advantages of RenderMan's hybrid architecture, the presentations focus on features such as a sophisticated system for ray-traced multi-bounce global illumination, interactive ray-traced re-rendering, deep textures, and methods for Maya artists to manage and integrate VFX with a minimal learning curve (more). [source]

Pixar Animation Studios announced that effective immediately, RenderMan for Maya is to be combined with RenderMan Studio as a single premium software solution at the new price of $1,300 US including a fully functional embedded renderer. This major product consolidation sets the stage for the impending, summer release of RenderMan Studio 4.0, which will provide Maya artists and technical directors with the latest tools to setup scene data, lighting, and shader assets for film-quality final rendering. 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. RenderMan Studio 4.0 is compatible with Maya 2013 and earlier versions on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. [source]

NVIDIA announced the introduction of NVIDIA Maximus technology that enables to simultaneously handle interactive graphics and the compute-intensive number crunching associated with the simulation or rendering of the results. NVIDIA Maximus achieves this by bringing together the professional 3D graphics capability of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics processing units (GPUs) with the massive parallel-computing power of the NVIDIA Tesla C2075 companion processor - under a unified driver that transparently assigns work to the right processor and is certified by industry leading application vendors. With NVIDIA Maximus-enabled applications, GPU compute work is assigned to run on the NVIDIA Tesla companion processor. This frees up the NVIDIA Quadro GPU to handle graphics functions, ensuring the quality and performance demanded by professional users. NVIDIA Maximus desktop workstation configurations start with the pairing of the NVIDIA Quadro 600 ($199 US MSRP) plus NVIDIA Tesla C2075 ($2,499 US MSRP). [source]

UK-based visual effects software developers The Foundry released KATANA, their new look development and lighting tool. Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, KATANA 1.0 replaces the conventional CG pipeline with a flexible recipe-based asset workflow. KATANA is built from the ground up with the needs of modern productions in mind. Extensive APIs allow integration with current pipelines, shader libraries and workflow tools, whilst its collaborative nature allows it to scale to meet the needs of even the most demanding productions. For more information on functionality, watch the NAB 2011 KATANA demos. KATANA runs on 64-bit Linux, requires an NVIDIA GPU capable of shader model 4.0, and supports Arnold 3.3.x (minimum 3.3.7.0), and PRMan 15.x - 16.x renderers. No price information has been publicly disclosed, if you wish to purchase or trial the product, visit this page. [source]

NewTek announced the release of LightWave 10.1, the latest version of its award-winning 3D modeling, animation, visual effects and rendering software for Windows and Mac OS X platforms. Version 10.1 offers a new off-axis stereoscopic camera rig option, improved Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR), advanced import and export capabilities, including MDD and integrated Autodesk Geometry Cache support, a new Skin Shader node, and more . The update is available as a free download for owners of LightWave 10. For a limited time, the upgrade from any previous version of LightWave to LightWave 10.1 is $495 US, and a full license is $895 US. This special pricing will expire at midnight on August 31, 2011. At that time, the price will revert to $695 US for an upgrade and $1,495 US for a full commercial license. Try LightWave free for 30 days at newtek.com. [source]

UK-based visual effects software developer The Foundry updated its professional videocompositing application NUKE. According to the creators, version 6.3 is The Foundry's biggest release of NUKE to date, bringing improvements and additions which expand the parameters of traditional compositing. The new tools include 3D Particles (NUKEX version only), Planar Tracker (NUKEX; pictured, left), Denoise (NUKEX), new Spline and Grid Warping, performance improvements, Audio Scratch Track, User Presets, Displacement Shader, 3D Projection, Customization enhancements and Deep Compositing functionality (more). If you already have a current NUKE or NUKEX maintenance agreement, you can download version 6.3 now - either on the NUKE Product Download page or the NUKEX Product Download page. [source]

Indian visual effects studio Pantheon Studios released a new beta version of its visual node-based RenderMan shader management tool ShaderBox for Windows and Linux systems. It provides a graphical user interface designed to faciliate RenderMan shader creation, in an interactive fashion. According to the authors, this is the most significant release so far implementing all the features planned for version 1.0, and rapidly improving the overall performance of the application. New features include undo-redo implementation, improved canvas with fluid navigation and clear rendering, faster file loading, automatic bug reporting tool, faster attribute editor and lot of bug fixing. Beta can be downloaded freely, at this location. [source]

RealFlow RenderKit, Next Limit's set of tools that has been designed to facilitate the complex task of rendering RealFlow fluids, reached v2.1. The RFRK consists of several procedural geometry shaders and a volumetric shader to simplify and accelerate rendering RealFlow scenes in various renderers (mental ray, RenderMan, Maxwell Render) and 3D animation packages (Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage). Among the key new features in version 2.1 is a Mac OS X compatibility (in addition to Linux and Windows versions), support for Houdini and its Mantra renderer, RenderMan Studio 3 support as well as Autodesk Maya 2011, and Softimage 2011 - 2011.5 support. For pricing information, visit this page; demos can be requested here. [source]