A Different Kind Of Premiere

Normally with this kind of thing, it's flash bulbs and red carpets. Last night though, there was nothing of the sort. It wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't star studded. What it was, was very informative and bloody good news. Those wonderful geniuses at Pixar trekked all the way over to Blighty to announce that their world beating animation software, RenderMan, will be available for public purchase in just a few months. To be more specific, they're releasing a new version of the program, that can be used in conjunction with Alias' popular animating programme, Maya. While the Pixar lads talked and explained some of the easy to use (no doubt they use that in the context of one already being a decent computer animator) functions and nifty tricks, employing terms like 'occlusion', 'ray-tracing' and 'Deep shadow technology', Empire just sat quietly, trying to translate this into layman's terms and looking at the pretty pictures getting prettier. Basically, all you need to know is that this is the beans. When the program is released this summer, we will have reached the point where for