Pixar Animation Studios has named its main building campus in Emeryville, California, after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

On its Pixar Times blog, the studio said it was honoring Jobs because of the role he played in the creation of Pixar.

Jobs was instrumental in the success of the animation studio, buying it from George Lucas in 1986 for $10 million and turning it into a company which was eventually sold for $7.4 billion to Disney 20 years later.

During that period, he worked closely with filmmaker John Lasseter - a relationship which culminated in the release in 1995 of the ground-breaking film, Toy Story.

Toy Story was the first ever feature length film created entirely out of computer graphics and it went on to become the top-grossing movie of 1995, generating more than $360 million worldwide.

After the success of the film, Jobs used his business savvy to help Pixar launch on the stock market, and kept it out of the clutches of Disney for several years. Under Michael Eisner, Disney was responsible for distributing Pixar's films.

Since then, Pixar's 12 animated features have grossed $7.2 billion worldwide and won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature six times with the films Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3.

The building now christened the Steve Jobs Building is the one which Jobs himself was involved in designing, according to Pixar. Its blog says that Jobs came up with the idea that the building should be centered around a large atrium to help "accidental collaboration" between employees who would otherwise be stuck in their individual offices.

Details of the building were posted on the Office Snapshots website in July. The site says Jobs hired Bohlin Jackson, best known for designing Bill Gates' Washington residential compound, to flesh out his vision for the campus, which was planned to hold up to 1000 employees.

Jobs said in his biography that, "If a building doesn't encourage [collaboration], you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see."

The building contains a reception, employee mailboxes, cafe, foosball, fitness center, two 40-seat viewing rooms and a large theater.