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RenderMan 23 - The Perfect Bookend to the Pipeline

RenderMan 23 is an incremental release, bringing our latest developments to you without requiring major changes to existing look development, lighting, or pipeline.

USD –  Together with Pixar’s USD team, we are improving RenderMan’s USD rendering capabilities so that we can render directly from Houdini 18's new LOPs framework Solaris

IPR –  More always-on editing capability

• Dynamic editing of AOVs and LPEs.Add them, remove them, or edit them – all without restarting your Live Renders.This is perfect for lighters and TDs tweaking shots
• Dynamically change resolutions without having to restart your render
• Quicker artist feedback via a new capability to control how the first iterations are rendered to the screen

Selected highlights of RenderMan are:

True Interactive Rendering — Rely on RenderMan like never before with the ability to continuously render while you work. We no longer use the intermediate step of rendering to RIB in interactive sessions. See changes immediately and make decisions sooner while refining your artistic choices. RenderMan has the ability to update while artists model scenes, complete layout, perform look development, and much more.  We've removed many of the restrictions that require users restart a render or wait for feedback.

All New Curve Representation — We introduce new curve rendering techniques designed around ray tracing large amounts of curves while editing grooms and looks without needing to re-render to see changes. Now you can comb, style, and dye without having to wait!

Lighting Improvements — Changes to our light selection techniques improve convergence on scenes with many lights and many types of lights at the same time. Move lights and change parameters with immediate results.

UI Enhancements — Bridge products enjoy streamlined workflows to enhance our interactive rendering capabilities. Improved exposure of RenderMan Attributes and Options help users make decisions and see results at all stages of production.

Rewritten RenderMan for Maya — RenderMan for Maya has been redesigned. Better integration means less looking for options, fewer clicks, and faster images. Render directly to Viewport 2.0 and see your changes as they happen. Time to first pixel is greatly reduced and your work is uninterrupted.

A New Ray Tracing Core — To compliment our interactive always-on workflow, we've rewritten the ray tracing core to improve speed and quality. Scenes interact quickly and converge faster than ever before!

Opacity from Presence — We now support partial presence values (values between 0 and 1) for true opacity. This changes to how we calculate presence on camera rays and results in partially opaque effects up to a user-specified depth in the integrator.

OpenVDB Updated — PxrVolume provides more options to enhance performance as well as new support for OpenVDB 45.0.

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