Miscellaneous and Important Changes 

• The global setting for "enable default light" is now respected when starting IPR and preview renders. The default light is removed as soon as any other light is added

• When a mesh light is created it is now named after the selected transform or group node and parented below it.  This makes it more straightforward to delete a mesh light along with its associated geo.  Attaching a mesh light to multiple selections is still supported, and in that case the light is left at the root level, and a message pointing that out is emitted in the script editor

• `pluginInfo -q -version RenderMan_for_Maya` now return the full version string, for example: '22.3b2 @ 12345678'

• Texture atlases are now converted to .tex when exporting a RenderMan Asset

• The preShapeScript and preShapePythonScript attributes available on archive and procedural nodes now undergo variable substitution

• Improved the Light Group UX

• Added a txmanager_rules.json to define more fine-grained txmake settings. Users can define the RMAN_TXMANAGER_RULES user/system environment variable to point to a user-defined txmanager_rules.json. See Texture Manager documentation

• RfM now defaults to binary RIB for batch renders when RIB mode selected to save disk space

• Prevent PxrOSL compilation if IPR is running (it may cause renderer instability) and issue a warning. Stop IPR first to compile

• It's now possible to create render layer overrides for the integrator selection

Fixes

• The batch render flag for -cam is now accepted for a different camera

• Fixed a bug where the image frame number could be off by one when motion blur was enabled and the shutter angle was 360

• Fixed a bug where the object visibility setting on PxrDomeLight wasn't behaving as expected in RfM

• The AOV UI didn't handle duplicate display channels correctly

• Sometimes, a display could use settings from another display driver node instead of the connected one

• Fixed a bug where cancelling and restarting a preview render in RfM would sometimes fail to successfully restart, would need two pushes of the render button

• The <layer> and <renderlayer> tokens were not correctly updated

• Fixed an error when saving preset browser prefs

• Fixed a bug where IPR/preview renders would sometimes use an unexpected camera

• Fixed a bug where sometimes the rman render command would ignore -ribFormat binary when used to generate an archive with the -ribArchiveFile flag

• Fixed a bug where license errors weren't showing up for batch renders

• The 'Restart on change' menu in the IPR button's resolution menu was creation an error

• Fixed a bug where batch renders could end up with the start frame being off by one if there were nodes in the scene that required runup

• Fixed potential error when archiving a Maya scene

• Fixed an error when Maya tries to restore the RLF Editor before RFM has been loaded

• Fixed a crash that could come about when selecting a color map for the dome light. Certain images could lead to a crash

• Texture Manager

  • Fixed an error when right-clicking on a texture in the list to re-convert it
    

  • Added tool tips to buttons to explain their role

  • Added a confirmation dialog before clearing the cache, stating how many gigabytes of textures will be deleted and re-converted

  • Output a message for each converted file with their conversion time

  • Displays a progress bar and disk usage

• Fixed a bug where motion blur for the particle instancer was looking dimmer than expected due to a doubled up sample

• Fixed a bug where Maya file nodes using preconverted Mudbox or zbrush textures wouldn't work

• Environment map preview renders would fail on Windows and has been fixed

• Fixed a bug where the <f4> token in the output cryptomatte file name wasn't getting substituted properly

• The "Always Fallback" setting is now respected in the texture manager
  

Developer Documentation

You can find a useful Doxygenated developer documentation in the Developers' Guide under RfM2

Known Limitations

RenderMan for Maya

• Light Linking volumes is not currently supported
• _pref references for Alembic caches not currently supported
• Only motion blurred meshes and transforms retain their blur after frame changes during IPR
• Deselecting "Receive Shadows" does not work.
• Creating a mesh light from existing geometry during IPR will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.
• We do not support Camera Facing Curves in Xgen
• Xgen will not reflect changes in the Collection
• Maya Fur Feedback is not supported
  

   

  Xgen : Xgen will crash during live rendering unless you set Window > Preferences > Xgen > Multithreading to "off" (unchecked).