Welcome to RenderMan 21.1_1653204!

Welcome to RenderMan 21.1 This release introduces improvements and some fixes to the previous release.

New Features

• New parameters adjustNormal and surfaceNormalMix in PxrBump and PxrNormalMap for adjusting normals and mixing surface normals.
• New pattern PxrAdjustNormal for adjusting normals output by custom nodes.
• Improved multiscatter features in PxrVolume.

Miscellaneous changes

• The normals (Nn) on displaced surfaces are now smooth (rather than facetted like Ngn) for nearly all surface types including Catmull-Clark subdivs, NURBS patches, Bezier patches, bilinear patches, and spheres. (Exceptions: polygon meshes and Loop subdivs.) The below example shows the correct smooth normals on the left and the incorrect on the right. Notice the faceting of the reflections is solved.

• Memory consumption for volumes has been greatly improved.

• Added a contrast control for multiscatter in PxrVolume
• Improved the way samples are distributed among lights, particularly in the presence of specular surfaces.
• Improved numerical precision in the CreateOrthonormalBasis() function.
• Allow rendering of SampleFilter and DisplayFilter plug-ins for otherwise empty scenes.
• Improved multiresolution tessellation cache ("GUT cache") performance for reflection and transmission rays.

• standardproceduralpath defaults to .:$RMANTREE/lib/plugins.

• Added PxrDoubleHenyeyGreenstein.h to PixarRenderMan-Examples distribution

• The macOS License Server install now registers the server with launchd and enables it if you have installed via the RenderMan Installer or there is an existing license file.

• Deprecated ShadingInterpolation attribute

• PxrLMSubsurface no longer includes specular color in the albedo AOV if there is a non-black subsurface albedo.

• The performance of tracing catmark subdivision meshes improved and scales much better with number of cores.
• Scanline EXR output time is significantly reduced when writing denoiser AOV checkpoints.

• Updated PxrImagePlaneFilter to use screen space offset values.
  
  

Bug Fixes

• Removed case where txmake would not calculate pixel aspect ratio (PAR) when resizing.
• Fix occlusion and clampTo range in PxrProjector. The occlusion parameter now defaults to OFF.

• Fixed a bug which could cause a crash when reading uniform float[2] variables during displacement or baking.

• Fixed a bug where displacements may cause a hang.

• Fixed a crash when using the asrgba option of the deepexr driver.

• Fixed an issue where watertight tessellation could corrupt the lookup of primvars.

• Fixed possible crash using Display 'rgb' with baker.
• Fix a crash when opacity cache was disabled.
• Fixed crash in the OpenEXR display driver when writing large tiled multi-channel EXR images that exceed 2GB uncompressed.
• Fixed display memory reporting.

• Fixed a bug that could cause crashes or artifacts on deforming geometry when setting the clampmotion option to zero.

• Fixed a bug where local emission would be camera visible for holdout objects.

• Fixed a bug in deepexr that could produce negative alphas when rendering volumes and outputting half-floats.

• Fixed under tessellation of subdivision surfaces causing blurring baked textures.

• A bug that caused a crash when a non-existent display channel was passed to the PxrFilmicToneMapper display/sample filter plugin has been addressed.

• Fix a potential render stall for blocking SSS rays.

• Fix possible holes with subdivision meshes when baking.

• Fixed a bug causing geometry that is offscreen before displacement and is close to the camera plane to potentially cause the render to hang or run out of memory.

• Fixed a potential hang when ending a re-rendering session.

• The possibility of pinholes at vertices with high valence when using Attribute "dice" "watertight" has been eliminated.

• Fixed issue recognizing packed OpenEXR Ci and a channels during checkpoint/recover renders.

• Fixed a bug where a light's shadowSubset and attribute shadowsubset wouldn't be combined properly. We are now properly using the intersection of the subsets. Similarly for shadow exclude subsets.

• Fixed issues with pretessellated subdivision surfaces and cached opacity.

• Fixed possible crash with PxrUPBP

• Fixed an issue that could cause haloing artifacts when denoising a subsurface PxrSurface that has 0 diffuse gain.