Pixar Inc, which wasn’t in Richmond, California last time we looked but appears to be now, has announced the excruciatingly-named Dingbat Looks, describing it as the first in a series of surface appearance libraries for use with the company’s three-dimensional RenderMan picture-making software on the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh family: the software is designed to give users the ability to apply a variety of photorealistic visual appearances to surfaces in a picture, such as making a colour slide with the text engraved onto a granite monument for a presentation, or give a dress design the surface appearance of of denim or khaki; Dingbat Looks will ship in November at $300; Pixar also announced the related Showplace picture composition software and ClipObjects series of three-dimensional clip object libraries but gave no prices.
