Release date: July 30, 2021

Welcome to RenderMan for Houdini 24.1!

RenderMan for Houdini 24.1 brings some new functionality to artists, as well as several bug fixes. 

These release notes are meant to be used together with the release notes from RenderMan for Houdini 24.0.  Also please see the release notes for RenderMan itself for the set of enhancements and bug fixes that you can find within the renderer in this release.

Houdini Production Builds Supported

We are only supporting the last three production builds (as of this release of RenderMan for Houdini) of the latest major version of Houdini, as well as the last production build of the two previous major versions of Houdini.

What's New

• Spot light rendering in the viewport improvements

• Support non-blocking preview renders, including support for auto-update flag
• Support the ability to specify OpenEXR Arbitrary Metadata when outputting EXR from the renderer
• A new Tractor python panel has been added. This allows users to spool RIB renders to either LocalQueue or Tractor.
• Support for Python 3 in Houdini 18.5

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a hang that could happen while using render regions while running XPU in the Houdini viewport
• Only add hatching stylized display filter with default shelf button
• Curves with a basis that requires duplicating endpoints (we do this so the curve appears to extend to the endpoints) would look wrong when motion blur was enabled and "width" was defined
• Fixed the "Render to MPlay" and "Render to Disk in Background" buttons on the RenderMan LOP
• When rendering with RenderMan in the viewport within Solaris, the camera should now tumble around the mouse cursor
• Fixed a problem where render as an archive would crash
• Fixed several UI issues
• Fixed a case where using a volume as a light was not working properly
• Fixed an incorrect colorspace menu parameter of PxrColorSpace
• Fixed a Solaris workflow where display and sample filters are allowed to come through Hydra as shading nodes.
• Fixed a crash when rewiring shading network
• Fixed the ability to denoise from RfH
• Within Solaris, bring in several fixes for the RenderMan Hydra Render Delegate, including fixes that optimize refresh speed
• In Solaris, fixed a bug where hdPrman would always specify the first field of a vdb file as the density field. Changed to look for a field called density, and if that's not found then default to using the first field.  Also, if the field name includes the string "color" treat it as a color, when we don't have access to type information.