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RenderMan version 25 provides major upgrades to look development and batch rendering, with many tools that improve artist workflows and complement the creative process. Here are some of the highlights:

RIS

• 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 MaterialX Lama. These include more accurate calculation of the interaction of light between different material layers, and a new separated 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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• Volumes — The introduction of volume aggregates in XPU is a major achievement, allowing for faster iteration times during the look development phase, as well as quicker final renders. Now render pyrotechnics and more with XPU!
  
  
• LPEs & AOVs — Full support for LPEs and arbitrary AOVs in XPU empowers artists with the flexibility and control they need to produce high-quality output for compositing and a variety of production scenarios.
  
  
• Look Development Improvements — The advancements in Look Development in XPU, including support for thin glass and trace subsets, provide better control for artists and help achieve even greater consistency between XPU renders and RIS.
  
  
• Deformation Motion Blur — XPU now supports full adds support for deformation motion blur, enabling studios to use XPU to generate fast quality control renders to give artists the opportunity to validate whether their animation cache was created correctly.
  
  
• Camera Controls — XPU now supports many controls of pxrCameraPxrCamera. These controls include additional features such as depth of field and chromatic aberration, which can be quickly adjusted during interactive rendering. Please refer to the docs for up to the date support.
  
  
• Interactivity — Interactivity is a key feature of XPU in RenderMan 25, which prioritizes interactive performance by improving the responsiveness of XPU to camera movements and shader parameter changes, through features such as Progressive Pixels, allowing artists to make quicker and more informed decisions, while providing faster image feedback for refining their choices.
  
  
• Rendering Controls — The rendering controls in XPU provide a more granular level of control over the rendering process, allowing artists to set trace depths for both diffuse and specular rays on a per-object basis. These controls help to achieve faster convergence speeds and produce renders that more closely match those produced by RenderMan's previous version, RIS.
  
  
• Improved Low-Memory GPU Support — The texture cache has been improved to perform better on GPUs that are memory constrained. You will get faster renders from the GPU if the texture cache needs to do out-of-core texture lookups.

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• Shading
  
  • PxrUnified integrator does not yet support all the standard rendering features.
  • <primstr:nameofvalue> substitution of data from a constant primvar or user attribute on an object for dynamic filename substitution is not yet working for the gettextureinfo() OSL call.
  • Using the ' . ' character in the handle for an OSL shader could cause unpredictable results during re-rendering.
• General rendering
  • Load on demand procedurals are not supported anymore, all procedurals are now loaded immediately.
  • RenderMan does not read point data from OpenVDB files.
  • Per-Instance baking is not supported, only the reference instance.3d baking: no direct bake-to-ptex support.
  • PxrBakePointCloud cannot directly render ptex.
  • Sample + Display filter plug-ins do not have access to lighting services for light dependent effects, e.g. lens flare.
  • Adding new mesh light on existing geometry during IPR results in double geometry.
  • Motion blurred polygons do not motion blur normals when deformed. Use Subdivision meshes instead.
  • When attempting to access an array primvar, you must first check the size of the array primvar and allocate the appropriate space. Not doing so may lead to a crash.
  • Points and curves cannot be used as geometric lights.
  • Analytical lights placed inside non-aggregate volumes may yield artifacts when made visible to the camera. As a work around, the light camera visibility should be turned off, and a geometry with a similar shape should be used (visible to camera, invisible to transmission and indirect rays), with the proper emissive bxdf.
  • Indirect Path Guiding in the PxrUnified integrator causes a crash.
• Bridge Products:
  • RfH: Soloing MaterialX Lama nodes in complex shading networks can give an incorrect result.

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