EMERYVILLE, CA (April 13, 2006) – Pixar Animation Studios today released a free evaluation version of RenderMan for Maya. Available for immediate download, RenderMan for Maya EVAL is a fully functional watermarked version that will allow any Maya user to freely explore the capabilities of the same RenderMan technology utilized in every live action and animated movie nominated for an Academy Award for Visual Effects over the last 10 years.

“Since launching RenderMan for Maya we have been overwhelmed with evaluation requests,” says Chris Ford, Business Director for RenderMan at Pixar. “The new RenderMan for Maya EVAL enables every Maya user aspiring to move up to the next level of CG imagery to fully explore its capabilities.”

Tightly integrated into Maya's workflow, Pixar's RenderMan for Maya EVAL is easy to install and use, and offers all the advantages of RenderMan including ultra-fast 3D motion blur, fast displacements, micro-polygon tessellation, ambient occlusion, deep shadows, and fully integrated one pass hair, fur, and particle rendering at the highest cinematic levels of quality.

“On a recent project we were provided 3D scan data as a low-poly mesh with displacement map and we simply could not get it to render without artifacts,” says Adam Stern President/VFX Supervisor of Artifex Studios. “With RenderMan for Maya it was rendering beautifully by the end of the day. The way RenderMan for Maya handles displacement is outstanding!”

“I recently needed to re-render an animation that had to be done fast and rendered 12 times larger than the original,” says Ryan Bird, owner of Blue Bird Digital LLC. “Even at this far larger scale RenderMan for Maya cut my rendering time from two minutes per frame to about 45 seconds and the rendered images looked far better than the originals.”

Availability

RenderMan for Maya EVAL 1.0 is available as a free download for either Windows or Mac OS X from the Pixar website at renderman.pixar.com. Full tutorials are supplied as standard. The full RenderMan for Maya plug-in is available from the same location at US $995. For more information visit renderman.pixar.com or email 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 20 Academy Awards® and its six films have grossed more than $3.2 billion at the worldwide box office to date. The Northern California studio’s next two film releases are Cars (June 9, 2006) and Ratatouille (summer 2007).

Recent rendering tests posted in the official 3dsmax forum (support.discreet.com) show comparable rendering performance in machines twice the price (the Intel/XP combo).

As of yet, 3Dguru hasn't seen any reports other than rendering perfs. We a looking forward to results about the graphics pipeline.

This update includes a number of critical fixes for 3ds Max 8 across several functional areas, including edit poly, Biped, Cloth & Load/Save animation.

This service pack also includes all bug fixes provided in Service Pack 1 and 2 in the following functional areas: Biped, Cloth, Batch Render, Hair, Material Editor, Maxscript, Script Controller, SDK, Snaps, trackview, particle flow, rendering, DX, display, UV Unwrap and mental ray

Refer to the Readme for more information.