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- Innovative Denoising Technology — The RenderMan Denoiser is completely new state-of-the-art denoising technology developed by Disney Research, which takes a new approach to denoising, using machine learning and training data from Disney, ILM, and Pixar. The Denoiser can significantly reduce render times for both feature animation and VFX, while delivering images of the highest quality. The new Denoiser excels on complex, detailed imagery that would cause other denoisers to fail. This technology has been used in production for several years now, including every Pixar feature animation since Toy Story 4 and has dramatically reduced render times at ILM, Pixar, and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Stylized Looks– Updates to the toolset allow artists to generate Stylized Looks with more creative control over toon shading, illustrative lighting, and linework. Highlights include line distort, overhauled Toon shading system, more hatching presets, optimized linework, and new Preset Browser Stylized Looks materials that extend the library.
MaterialX Lama– ILM has contributed enhancements and features to to MaterialX Lama. These include more accurate calculation of the interaction of light between different material layers, and a new iridescence material response has been included.
- Baking performance and control – If you’re using RenderMan to bake global illumination into textures for real-time applications, we’ve improved performance up to 2x, as well as added additional controls for controlling resolution.
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Pixar's XPU technology reaches significant milestones in version 25, including support for volumes, secondary passes, trace groups, and many enhancements to for look development, lighting, and interactivity. These milestones represent a major evolution of Pixar’s next generation renderer, XPU.
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RenderMan continues to evolve. We periodically need to deprecate functionality, and then after a time, we remove the features from the product. Below is the list of features that had been previously deprecated, and have now been removed.
RenderMan
- PxrSeExpr was deprecated in RenderMan 24. It has been removed from the documentation and will eventually be removed from the distribution.
RenderMan for Maya
- RIB within ZIP archives is no longer supported.
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Known Limitations
Installation + Licensing
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- Transform edits of aggregate volumes is not working properly – pieces of the volumes will get cut off or other artifacts exist. RMAN-20453
- The albedo on Lama dielectric goes to white at grazing angles. This differs from Lama dielectric in previous versions of RenderMan, and current PxrSurface material equivalents. RMAN-20423
- Lama Bxdfs BxDFs output albedo even when objects are matted. RMAN-20433
- Lama emits warnings about the name of parameters "color" and "normal". These warnings can be ignored. RMAN-20421
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- Textures in the renderer are not automatically updated during an interactive render session when using the Texture Manager. You must restart XPU to pick up the change to the texture. RMAN-20377
- Volume For some homogeneous volumes, volume aggregates render with noisier alpha than RIS. Heterogeneous volumes such as clouds, explosions, and smoke are not affected. RMAN-20100
- Volume Volumes with colored extinction isnaren't rendering correctly. RMAN-20125
- There is a ray tracing difference between the CPU and GPU components of XPU. It is most visible in diffusion subsurface scattering. RMAN-20515
- Some AOVs in XPU are rendering differently than RIS. directDiffuse is dimmer in XPU. indirectDiffuse is dimmer in XPU. indirectSpecular is brighter in XPU. subsurface is black in RIS, non-black in XPUSubsurface scattering is currently assigned to the wrong AOV. RMAN-19902
- Extinction color in PxrSurface is rendering differently in XPU than RIS. RMAN-16771
- If you change the resolution while rendering interactively to "it", "it" will crash. RMAN-20237
- OSL backfacing() method isn't working correctly in XPU. RMAN-20232
- The GPU portion of XPU can render artefacts artifacts with the trace:reflectexcludesubset. RMAN-20393
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- When batch rendering from a RIB exported from Houdini, the searchpath may contain an invalid path that causes RenderMan to load the wrong OpenVDB shared library, causing batch renders to fail. The workaround is to edit the "procedural" searchpath in the RIB to $RMANTREE/lib/plugins instead of the one in the RenderMan for Houdini directory. RMAN-20297
- RfSolaris: Displacement not working when material is referenced from /mat. RMAN-19243
- RfSolaris: Texture memory limits are not properly respected. RMAN-20563
- RfSolaris: If you render to "it", the render may happen twice. RMAN-19591
RenderMan for Maya
- F-Stop is divided by 10X with PxrCamera. RMAN-20475
- Chromatic aberration is different in RIS than XPU with RfM. RMAN-20474
- When loading 25.0 in RfM, several warnings are in the script editor about being unable to validate OCIO configuration path. RMAN-20565
RfM fails to export rib to a folder that has spaces in the name. RMAN-20517
- Bezier and Constant interpolation types for ramps are not supported. RMAN-19486
- Overriding PYTHONPATH can cause denoising to fail. RMAN-20546
- If you are using the RenderMan Hydra Render Delegate in Maya, and are rendering when you close Maya, there will be a crash on exit. RMAN-18308
- LamaIridescence has no out color visible in Hypershade. You can manually get the output plug, or you can hit the "hamburger" icon for the node several times to cause the plug to be visible. RMAN-20584
- Cannot If you want to render to "it" in on Windows with Maya 2020, you must first manually launch "it". RMAN-2018316719
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Known Limitations - Existing
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