What Do Spiderman and Windows HPC Server 2008 Have in Common?

The answer is RenderMan, the award-winning special effects software from Pixar. Version 14.0 (yes, 14.0) of RenderMan Pro Server is going to support Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft's operating system for high-performance computing clusters and supercomputers.

As for what this means for people in the special effects, this is what Todd Needham had to say on the Windows Server Division blog:

Incredible image complexity, accelerated ray-tracing, optimized hair performance, every last strand, RenderMan is the gold standard, they win Academy Awards, you can’t do animation right without RenderMan.  A new SDK? Python binding? Custom tools? George Lucas would’ve killed to have this stuff...

Pixar uses RenderMan to make its own movies, like The Incredibles, but it's been used in pretty much every movie you've heard of with special effects (including the aforementioned Spiderman). You can see the list of movies on the Pixar site. How's this for a gold standard?

Every Visual Effects Academy Award Winner of the past 15 years relied on Pixar's RenderMan. In fact, 47 out of the last 50 Visual Effect nominees used Pixar's RenderMan.

You don't have to be in the movie industry to find that impressive.