SANTA CLARA, CA — To accelerate production of its computer-animated feature films and short film content, Pixar Animation Studios is licensing a suite of Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) technologies related to image rendering. The multi-year strategic licensing agreement gives Pixar access to Nvidia’s quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) rendering methods, which can make rendering more efficient, especially when powered by GPUs and other massively parallel computing architectures.
Pixar Animation Studios is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company and has created some of the most successful animated films of all time, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Cars, The Incredibles, and Brave. Its movies have won 30 Academy Awards and have grossed more than $8.7 billion worldwide.
“Nvidia and Pixar have worked together for years to improve workflows in content creation,” explains Steven Parker, vice president of engineering and CTO of rendering technology at Nvidia. “With Nvidia’s QMC sampling technology, Pixar can accelerate its creative process while continuing to produce visual imagery and animation of the very highest standard.”
“Pixar has long used Nvidia GPU technology to push the limits of what is possible in animation and the filmmaking process,” notes Steve May, vice president and CTO at Pixar. “Nvidia’s particular QMC implementation has the potential to enhance rendering functionality and significantly reduce our rendering times.”
As part of the agreement, Nvidia will also contribute ray-tracing technology to Pixar’s OpenSubdiv Project, an open-source initiative to promote high-performance subdivision surface evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This will enable rendering of complex Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces in animation with unprecedented precision.