Contents
Elemental © Disney/Pixar
Welcome to the RenderMan 25 Documentation!
Here you can find information on how to install, license, and use RenderMan and its various bridge products for Maya, Houdini, Blender, and Katana.
Pixar's RenderMan
For over 30 years RenderMan has been at the forefront of the visual effects revolution, and today RenderMan is a high-performance renderer built to tackle the most complicated 3D scenes imaginable. RenderMan version 25 provides a next-level denoiser that allows you to substantially reduce render times, new MaterialX Lama features from ILM, and new features in Stylized Looks.
RenderMan XPU™ brings support for LPEs and a new texture cache that provides faster render times on machines low on GPU memory.
RenderMan 25 - Main Features
Denoiser — Originally developed at Disney Research, in conjunction with Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Industrial Light & Magic, the new Denoiser brings machine learning to denoising. It maintains sharpness even in the most difficult of scenes, such as those with hair and fur, or those with lots of points-based effects.
The denoiser will allow you to cut off your renders substantially earlier than before, saving you time on your render farm.
MaterialX Lama improvements — Our partnership with Industrial Light & Magic continues with RenderMan 25.
First introduced in RenderMan 24, MaterialX Lama brings users a component-based and physically plausible shading system for "Layered Materials". RenderMan 25 brings improvements in how light interacts between material layers, as well as new iridescence material response.
Stylized Looks improvements — RenderMan’s toolset for generating non-photorealistic images receives various updates, including numerous enhancements to give artists more control over Toon shading, Illustrative lighting through hatching & watercolor, and Linework.
Lookdev improvements in RenderMan XPU™ — These features make XPU renders an even closer match to RIS on a broader variety of look development scenarios by providing support for features such as LPEs and trace groups.
Enhanced Cameras in RenderMan XPU™ — Use interactive rendering for dialing in the depth of field, vignetting, and other camera effects.
Read all about the new features in version 25 in the Release Notes.
Previous documentation versions (prior to 22) can be found through the RenderMan Support Forums for download. View your archive downloads and find the version you need, the documentation bundle is available on the page after selecting "Next" from your version choice.
The Doxygen package for software developers is available under the Developer's Guide.