Miscellaneous Changes

• Materials set at instance source locations are ignored

• Dicing cameras are now specified as a camera's scenegraph location. The "worldcamera" and "framecamera" options are no longer supported. This also removes the need to add the dicing camera to a RenderOutputDefine.

• PxrSphereLights with cone angles are now facing the correct direction
• Instance Instanced primvars are no longer supported.  considered master attributes and cannot be altered per-instance. Use user attributes instead on instances, which allows for shading variation and flexibility.
• Leaf level instancing now requires that locations with the instance.ID attribute have no children.  RfK will not traverse past a location with instance.ID set.
• RIB Include has been removed
• Integrator settings are now configured with a new node called PrmanIntegratorSettings. This node automatically picks up any integrators with Args files on RMAN_RIXPLUGINPATH.
• "insertWhen" directives for config.xml have changed.
• Parameter Layout has been removed from PrmanGlobalStatements and PrmanObjectStatements
• Attributes in PrmanObjectStatements are now split into either an "attributes", primAttributes or "primvars" group depending on whether the attribute can vary per instance.
• The grouping membership attribute no longer automatically prepends the value set with a "+" (empty double quotes). This is to allow fuller functionality to match the RenderMan attribute syntax. That syntax allows: "" - add to the membership specified at a higher level, "-" - remove from the membership specified at a higher level, "" - replace the membership.
• There is a new node called PrmanCameraSettings for setting camera settings
• There have been a few changes related to cameras and PrmanGlobalStatements: -
  
  • dofAspect was a hider setting, but is now found under prmanCameraStatements.camera.depthOfField.dofAspect.
  • Projection plugins can be created as materials assigned to /root. They are no longer available through PGS.
  • backgroundColor can be created as a "PxrBackgroundDisplayFilter" assigned to /root. It is no longer available in PGS.
  • The settings in the camera motionBlur section have changed and could not be automatically remapped. It is found in the PxrCamera projection node.
  • It is no longer necessary to create a camera with frameBeginCameraPath. All cameras in the scene will be created.
• No longer supported:
  • "prmanGlobalSettings.plugin.instanceSourceMode"
  • "prmanGlobalSettings.commandArguments.numThreadModeProcs"
  • "textures" attribute group
  • The PrmanLightFilterCreate macro has been removed in favor of creating light filters in GafferThree
  • camera fov motion blur

• There is a new node called PrmanCameraSettings for setting camera settings

• Added new offscreen displacement bound primAttribute, please see: displacementbound:offscreen

• Arbitrary clipping planes are now supportedReorganized the PrmanObjectStatements node to improve clarity and workflow

• The global traversal setting "flattenInstanceSources" indicates whether instance sources should be flattened internally in the renderer. By default this is on which is the most efficient and flexible for the common case. Disabling this option allows deeper nesting of instance sources with the caveat that RenderMan only supports 4 levels of nesting, and it prevents per-instance variation on instance source children. This can be overridden locally by the local PrmanObjectStatements parameter - "traversal.flattenInstanceSource" See the documentation on Instancing for an explanation of benefits and limitations

• OpenEXR outputs containing "Ci,a" as the first four channels will now write out an EXR with R,G,B,A as the first four channels (i.e. "asrgba" will be enabled for all beauty renders).

• Added extensibility to RfK's procedural argument parsing. Now RfK will look for an attribute "argsConversionFunc" which is the name of a attribute function for custom argument conversion

• Add support for prman command line options "woff", "logfile", and "loglevel"

• RfK will now use the basis from the alembic file unless overridden by the curve.basis setting in PrmanObjectStatements (NOTE: only supported with AlembicInPrman initially for 2.6)

• The default type in PrmanOutputChannelDefine is now "color"

• Live render edits to ROI / cropWindow now use the intersection of the two attributes

• Alembic cameras now use the camera settings from prmanGlobalStatements

• OSL parameters now have connection type checking for the inputs and ouputs of PrmanShadingNode

• OSL parameters support a "tag" hint in the metadata to allow users to specify a connection type for the parameter. For multiple types on outputs, use a "|" to delimit the options (eg "struct|manifold")

• RfK now supports connections between any color, normal, point, and vector parameters