Pixar releases RenderMan 26.2 | CG Channel

Initially posted on 9 April 2024, and up to date with particulars of RenderMan 26.2.

Pixar has launched RenderMan 26, the most recent main replace to its production renderer for visible results and animation work.

RenderMan 26.0 extends RenderMan XPU, the software program’s GPU/CPU render engine, including help for gentle linking, new gentle and digicam properties, and adaptive sampling.

As well as, the AI denoiser can now be used interactively in Blender and Katana, Stylized Appears to be like has been up to date, and the software program now helps VFX Reference Platform 2023.

The mixing plugins for Blender, Houdini, Katana and Maya have all additionally been up to date.

Assist for adaptive sampling improves efficiency of RenderMan XPU.

RenderMan XPU: help for gentle linking, extra digicam properties, and adaptive sampling
In contrast to Pixar’s latest main releases, RenderMan 26 doesn’t add any fully new toolsets, but it surely does lengthen a number of of the important thing options from these releases.

Essentially the most important adjustments are to RenderMan XPU, the hybrid GPU/CPU renderer added in RenderMan 24, which now helps a a lot wider vary of lighting and digicam options.

That features all of RenderMan’s analytic gentle sorts, gentle filters, and shadow and light-weight linking; plus digicam shutter controls, and tilt shift, lens aberration, and cut up diopter properties.

You’ll be able to see a listing of the remaining features not supported in XPU here, together with mesh lights, the Lama layered materials system, and a few much less customary geometry sorts.

Efficiency has additionally been improved, with help for adaptive sampling dashing up renders.

As well as, Pixar says that interactivity in scenes with many lights is now considerably higher, making XPU higher suited to shot format in addition to key lighting.

Progressive Pixels, XPU’s interactive refinement mode, now helps fractional iterations, making it doable to tune efficiency nonetheless additional.

Stylized Appears to be like: new Canvas layer, creative toon mode and extra line rendering controls
The Stylized Looks non-photorealistic rendering toolset, additionally launched in RenderMan 24, will get a workflow-focused replace, together with a brand new Canvas layer and higher group of AOVs.

The Stylized Control system will get a brand new creative toon mode – which, not like the prevailing toon shading, is just not bodily based mostly, increasing the vary of stylization out there.

The line rendering system will get new colour remapping and filtering controls, the latter making it doable to render smoother traces.

AI denoiser: help for interactive denoising in Blender and Katana
As well as, the AI-trained denoiser launched in RenderMan 25 for RIS, RenderMan’s CPU-based final-quality render engine, is now out there interactively in Blender and Katana.

Assist for interactive denoising in Maya and Houdini will comply with in future releases.

Pixar describes the interactive denoiser as able to eradicating noise on photographs with very low common pattern counts and as being “predictive of” the output of the complete offline denoiser.

Efficiency enhancements, render statistics and pipeline integration
Beneath the hood, efficiency of each RIS and XPU has been improved, notably when engaged on scenes with many situations, and when studying in textures, notably EXR textures.

RenderMan’s statistics system has additionally been up to date, with a brand new standalone stats portal application for interacting with the info it generates.

For pipeline integration, RenderMan 26 now follows the CY2023 spec for VFX Reference Platform, and help for Python 2 has now been deprecated.

Pixar additionally plans to take away its previous deep texture format within the subsequent launch in favor of DeepEXR.

A nonetheless from Pixar’s animated function Inside Out 2, used to advertise RenderMan 26.

Up to date 26 April 2024: Pixar has launched RenderMan 26.1.

It’s primarily a bugfix replace, but it surely provides help for OpenVDB caching in RIS, dashing up renders of volumetric results the place the identical VDB grid is used many instances.