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With the release of RenderMan Studio, Pixar's imaging tool, “it”, has received a complete overhaul, from the ground up. “it” is a robust framebuffer and render view window, offering complete floating point support and a powerful and flexible catalog, as well as a fast and powerful imaging tool that is capable of production-qualilty image manipulation and compositing usually found only in high-end standalone products.

For a complete rundown of this radical makeover, check out the “it” documentation, but here are a few of the highlights of the new, “better-stronger-faster” release:

• Support for industrial strength imaging —
  • A new imaging infrastructure based on Pixar's in-house IceMan system
  • A new IceMan expression syntax based on Io
  • The IceMan environment is now available while using “it” via the GUI, running “it” from the command line without the GUI, and in Maya batch-rendering mode via the new IceMan display driver.
• Enhanced Integration with RfM — A new IceMan display driver, selected from the Image Format menu, enables embedding IceMan scripts within RIB files and can be used with both interactive and batch renders. Currently, there is an example IceMan Post-render script, Slate, which can be added as an Extra Output Setting via the Passes tab. The options and values for Slate can be edited in rmanGenSlateHandler.mel.
• Enhanced tcl Support — Users can now execute single-line tcl scripts via the console, a la:

  	% it -session foo -tcl "tclcommand"

• Native floating point image support, HDRI, tonemapping
• Improved pixel drawing performance
• Improved remapping features, including a remap option for viewing shadow maps, accessed via the “it” status panel: remap: shadow map.
• A new “wipe” feature, enabling easy image-to-image comparisons
• Better support for OpenEXR files
• Improved support for RenderMan AOV images
• “it” notes are now included in the image description.
• A new preference enables users to customize image window title bar contents.

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