Interactive Rendering

RenderMan supports updating a scene during rendering. Many features are supported including importing and exporting assets on-the-fly, animation, transformation, light and material parameter changes and more!

Fast Ray Tracing Core

To compliment the improvements to interactive rendering are improvements to the ray tracing core of RenderMan. Speed and quality are improved to provide a fast and seamless experience while the artist works.

Immediate Rendering

Stop waiting for a render to begin. RenderMan skips the RIB generation process when rendering in interactive sessions to give users control and results as quickly as possible.

Analytic Area Lights

Area Lights are a powerful way to create physically accurate lighting while optimizing sampling budgets and, in turn, performance. PRMan's area lights support light filters, as well as light-linking, groups, per-group AOVs, and IES profiles and portals.

Global Illumination

Sometimes called "Indirect Illumination," RenderMan for Katana supports Global Illumination effects, subtle diffuse shading effects that are created by sampling the lighting of a scene many times from a given point. This technique can yield highly realistic results. Occlusion, which merely samples the "coverage" of a point (and is cheaper than Indirect Illumination), is also supported automatically or through the PxrOcclusion Integrator.

Volume Rendering

RfK supports PRMan's first class volumetric rendering capabilities, enabling the creation of volumetric effects including motion blur, multi-scattering, non-homogenous, etc.

True Curved Surfaces

Tessellation settings are never an issue with RenderMan when rendering NURBS and subdivision surfaces. Since RenderMan renders true curved surfaces, NURBS and subdivision surfaces will never have faceting artifacts.

Subsurface Scattering

RenderMan for Katana supports path-traced subsurface scattering, an important effect for realistically rendering translucent materials, like skin, flesh, fat, fruits, milk, marble, and many others. Subsurface scattering is responsible for effects like color bleeding inside materials, or the diffusion of light across shadow boundaries. RfK includes support for ray-traced subsurface scattering through materials shipped with RenderMan.

Secondary Outputs

RenderMan for Katana supports secondary outputs (AOVs, or Arbitrary Output Variables), which can be any arbitrary information contained in a shader. Users may also take advantage of Light Path Expressions (LPE) for powerful control over outputs.