Elemental © Disney/Pixar

June 29, 2023

Welcome to RenderMan 25.2

RenderMan version 25.2 builds on RenderMan 25.0 and 25.1, which provided major upgrades to look development and batch rendering.  RenderMan 25 brings many tools that improve artist workflows and complement the creative process. This release provides you with bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Please see the RenderMan 25.0 Release Notes for all of the new features and known limitations of RenderMan 25.

Minor Enhancements and Fixes

RIS and XPU

• Upgraded the compiler we use to build RenderMan to solve an issue that could cause spurious crashes.  PRMAN-2756
• Decrease the number of threads that the statistics framework spawns.  This was an issue on high core count machines.  RMAN-20278

RIS

• BxDFs: Fixes some of the artifacts in Lama when low poly meshes are used in addition to bump maps. The artifacts are only visible when the parameter "adjustAmount" in PxrBump is different to its default value of 1.0.
• BxDFs: Lama albedo AOVs should now correctly take tint parameters into account.  RMAN-20423
• Volumes: Fixed a memory leak in PxrPathTracer when aggregate volumes were used.  RMAN-20830
• Baking: Fixed a crash that could result when baking UDIMs for materials using Lama networks.  RMAN-20651
• Integration: Switched from MIS to Resampled Importance Sampling for weighting pathguiding and BxDF samples. This only has an effect if pathguiding is enabled, and provides significant convergence improvements in a number of cases, particularly for surfaces with lower roughness.

XPU

• LPEs and AOVs:  Indirect LPEs in XPU now match RIS better for the case of surfaces with multiple lobes and high specular roughness.  RMAN-19902
• Volumes: A significant bug in minlength dicing causing artifacts in XPU volumes when using dsominmax 0 has been addressed.  RMAN-20764
• Volumes: A XPU bug which caused cameras inside volumes to consume all memory when rendered in RfH has been fixed.  RMAN-20823
• Volumes: Implemented trilinear filtering of volumes as nearest neighbor with random jitter.  RMAN-20765
• Cameras: Fixed a bug that caused Ri:Shutter 0,0 to render blank images in hdPrman.  RMAN-20621
• File Output: If XPU attempts to write an output EXR file to a file path that doesn't exist, it will no longer crash.  RMAN-20791
• Lighting: Fixed a crash that occurred while using dome lights with textures.  RMAN-20294

Stylized Looks

• PxrStylizedHatching:
  • UI Updates
  • Better defaults for out of the box look
  • Hatch on Color and BG moved to Compositing section of the UI
  • New compositing models – multiply and screen
  • Canvas only outside alpha for background color and texture

All Bridge Products

• Hydra and hdPrman: Change the default pixel filter to importance.  This is the only mode supported by XPU, and is the mode that is required by the denoiser.  RMAN-20617
• Hydra and hdPrman: Added locks around clearing the framebuffer to prevent black buckets from appearing when they shouldn't.  RMAN-20869

RenderMan for Houdini

• Solaris: Previously, when switching to hdPrman while there is an active Solaris live render, the renderer would either quietly fail (RIS) or crash the DCC (XPU). While this scenario still fails, it will now output an Xcpt warning and not crash..  RMAN-20793
• Solaris: Improvements to the data window and display window calculations.  RMAN-20796
• Solaris: Properly set the mse statistics attributes in AOVs for denoising.  RMAN-20783
• Solaris: Fixed an issue where if the sampleCount AOV was requested and XPU was the renderer, a black screen could result.  RMAN-20784
• Solaris: Manipulating/editing dome lights in XPU interactively now has better performance.  RMAN-20320
• Solaris: Cryptomatte filenames will now take into account husk tile suffix.  RMAN-20696
• Solaris: The RenderMan LOP now correctly matches the name of the created RenderMan Render Setting node to the one when creating that LOP node on its own.
• Removed the asymmetry denoiser parameter from the RfH UI.  RMAN-20672

RenderMan for Katana

• Fixed bugs with the enable checkboxes in the PrmanStylizedLooks macro:
  • Added two switch nodes to fix an error when all display filter checkboxes are disabled. The SNAC node would complain that there were no connections.
  • Added an OpResolve node after the display filter network material to fix an issue where the enable checkboxes wouldn't update the live render correctly unless Flush Caches was pressed

RenderMan for Maya

• Fixed a bug which would cause IPR or Viewport renders running in XPUGPU mode in Maya to sometimes crash when the application was closed.  RMAN-18308

• Fixed a bug affecting the invalidation of non .tex textures in XPU where the updated texture from the Texture Manager would not be rendered. Instead the old texture before the invalidation would be used.  RMAN-17686
• Removed the asymmetry denoiser parameter from the RfM UI.  RMAN-20672

RenderMan for Blender

Changes:

• Changing the diffuseColor parameter when using PxrDiffuse should now update the viewport color of the object, similar to PxrSurface.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug where perspective view was incorrectly taking into account the render camera's shift_x and shift_y properties.
• Fixed issue where <br> was not getting correctly substituted in the tooltips
• Fixed a bug where blender_batch would fail when using Blender 3.5
• Fixed an issue with using numpy.int when using Blender 3.5
• Fixed a bug where node names with a ':' character in them would cause shading errors
• Fixed a bug where updating the parameters of any stylized filters would not update correctly during IPR.

Note, RenderMan 25.2 should work with the just released Blender 3.6 LTS