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With the divide between 2D and 3D becoming increasingly indistinguishable, I thought I'd share some information about an interesting alternative to Nuke’s default scanline render node and indeed much of Nuke’s current 3D shading tool set.

Pixar, renowned for their cutting edge animation, know better than anyone the advantages of saving time where possible. The technical directors and supervisors on Cars 2 were faced with the challenge of building locations for this feature length animation. Those of you who have seen the sequel will remember that the lead character, Lightning McQueen, is being sent around the globe to race in the world Grand Prix. The challenge for the Pixar creative team was to build recognizable cities, on a very broad scale.

We hosted the much-anticipated London Pixar RenderMan User Group Meeting last week, and all I can say is that it was pretty packed.

Just by being on Linux, MARI has rocked the post industry. All those guys tired of dual-booting, of trying to get Photoshop to work in Wine or some other “in-elegant Linux solution”. Or for those trying to use a laptop hooked up to the network or two machines with a KVM switcher (you know who you are) MARI is like a breath of fresh air! No nasty print type things getting in the way of painting at high bit depths and HDR floating points. Everything works. No nasty greying out of pull downs as it only works in 8 bit situations; geometry size is not an issue either, texture size is 32k square. It’s eats massive data sets elegantly. It’s a Godsend.

Yesterday, Pixar announced an unprecedented price drop in their flagship product RenderMan® Pro Server. The 40% reduction will allow studios and freelancers that were previously unable to buy into the technology, to get a slice of the Film / VFX industry standard renderer. With the global CG expansion, Pixar appreciate that the growth of renderfarms is real and happening now, this move allows existing customers to ramp up their rendering capabilities in a more cost effective manner whilst allowing smaller shops and freelancers access to the toolset.

I am delighted to announce that Escape Studios has been bestowed the honour of being Pixar's RenderMan International Reseller of the Year 2010! With around 20 worldwide RenderMan partners, we are super pleased with this news!

All of us on the RenderMan team were delighted to hear that so many of you found Lee Danskin's RenderMan tips and Trick's webinar so useful. There were a lot of questions at the end, some of which Lee did not get a chance to answer so we have put them in a Q&A which you can check out by logging into Escape's Free Resource Centre. We've also recorded the webinar, so if you missed it or want to see it again, log in and watch it.

Hi Everyone, my name is Chris Ford from Pixar Animation Studios and I manage Pixar's RenderMan business from our studio in California. I am delighted that Escape has kindly offered me the opportunity to contribute an occasional guest blog post.

We are all looking forward to the UGM tonight with our very technical friends at Pixar! Over 200 people in attendance... should be a great night and plenty of Escape $ behind the bar!

Ptex is a technique for per-face, multi-resolution texture mapping without the need to setup your UV's manually. While the paper by Brent Burley (Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Dylan Lacewell (Walt Disney Animation Studios & University of Utah) has been around for a while, last Friday, Disney released the project as open source.