Pixar Animation Studios released his Academy Award®-winning RenderMan Pro Server software version 16.0. According to Pixar, this release should represent some „break-through „in Pixar’s rendering technology offering many of new possibilities, enhancements, and performance gains to speed up your workflow.
Some of the features which came with this release is RenderMan's ray tracing technology, including a new ray tracing hider, a radiosity cache, and physically plausible shading. This fact allows the render engine to take full advantage of multi-cores architectures. Next features are pointed to post production with full support of spherical harmonics, enhanced threading scalability, and accelerated baseline performance. RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 introduces also a free downloadable library including a C++ binding for RIB and access to Deep Textures.
"RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 fulfills every need on our feature request list. It lets us focus on the customizations we really care about for ray tracing physically-correct lighting in the cleanest way possible," said Dan Evans, Head of Shaders at Framestore, London. "The speed of the new radiosity cache makes ray-traced global illumination practical in a single render pass, and we can now refine our test frames live using the new progressive ray tracing. Multi-bounce glossy specular, importance sampling, area shadows, and direct lighting are now a breeze thanks to the renderer supporting them all directly. Better still, regular ray tracing is staggeringly faster at 8X on some of our more complex stereo renders.” - Quote
"RenderMan Pro Server is one of those tools that keep surprising release after release. The new version 16.0 incorporates so many enhancements and brand new features such as radiosity caching and an outstanding physically-based shading pipeline, that it represents a true milestone in the products evolution," said Max Liani, Lighting Lead at Animal Logic, Sydney. "Spanning from the new feature set, to in depth render logging, to the extensive documentation and customer support, it is very hard to find another product that is so balanced and versatile." – Quote
Source and full article: Pixar