“Given that the majority of major VFX films use RenderMan totally or partially this remain a primary focus” Ford adds. While fully 3D animated films tend to be hugely popular and profitable, the growth of fully animated feature films in production has flattened off globally but the number of VFX films continues to rise “especially now the recession is slowly fading. Additionally, visual effects farms away from Weta/ILM/Lucasfilm might typically be smaller in size.īlocking from Pixars Toy Story 3 rendered in RenderMan If this farm used Pixar’s RenderMan – then the render-farm would now be $1,500,000 to set up, but of course such large facilities tend to be individually handled and bid. So for example a major animated studio typically might set up a world class render farm of 1500 licenses.
Our new pricing allows all RenderMan Pro Server customers to expand their render farms while at the same time providing new opportunities for smaller studios to take on larger projects” says Chris Ford, RenderMan Business Director at Pixar. Render farms are growing ever larger while multi-core architectures are now commonplace. “The primary rationale behind our price reduction is to realign the cost of RenderMan with the trends we see in the entire industry. We spoke to Chris Ford from Pixar’s RenderMan division this morning about the change. The price had previously been $3,500 per seat. In addition, annual maintenance for each RenderMan Pro Server license is now $600 per license, a reduction of 15%. Effective immediately, the price of an individual license of RenderMan Pro Server is $2,000 per license, a reduction of 40% with additional price discounts available when purchasing multiple licenses. Pixar Animation Studios today announced a new price for RenderMan Pro Server software. Fxguide spoke to the RenderMan team about the new pricing. It will allow more independent owner/animators to use RenderMan on smaller projects and its volume pricing reductions reflect the massive growth in render farms.
As the most highly regarded feature film renderer, – this is significant news. Pixar announced today that it is dramatically lowering the cost of RenderMan.