Elemental © Disney/Pixar

April 17, 2023

Welcome to RenderMan 25.0

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• Support Updates — The latest versions of most DCCs are now supported by RenderMan: Houdini, Katana, Maya & Solaris (with support for the latest Blender to follow, while Maya 2024 is not supported
• ). There are also general stability improvements in all of the DCCs, including the Preset Browser and the Texture Manager.
  
  
• New Preset Libraries — The Library of assets that ship with the Preset Browser expands substantially with several new collections for fur, hair, stylization, diverse skin, and more. All are available from the RenderMan Preset Browser.
  
  
• Production-Grade Pyrotechnics — A library of pyrotechnic presets now ship with version 25. The library includes Smoke, Flames, Campfire, Smokey Campfire, & Fire Ball for use in Blender, Houdini, Maya & Katana, and were developed in collaboration with Pixar VFX TD, Hope Shroers.
  
  
• Houdini Pyro HDA — Houdini based Kaboom Box HDA with advanced VBD processing for photoreal pyro volumes, smoke, fire and everything in between, all wrapped up an artist friend UI and created by Pixar FX TD, Hope ShroersSchroers.
  
  
• Solaris & MaterialX — RenderMan's capabilities in Solaris have been improved with support for MaterialX, enhancements to controlling the camera shutter, and motion blur fixes.
  
  
• Katana 6 Support — The latest version of Katana 6 now has support for soloing material nodes in RenderMan.

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• Toon Mask support

• NPRdistort feature & AOV requirement

• New parameters for Distort feature: distortU, distortV, distortBumpSwitch, distortScaleToon_Mask switch & feature

• Distort Bump Switch for alternative distort using Bump Normal

• PxrStylizedToon:

• Color Spline Ramp for added creativity
• Toon Mask support (with PxrStylizedControl)
  
• UI updatespage & naming improvements
  
• Improved whiteshader calculations
• Signal Pre Gain/Gamma
• Threshold Min and Max for Signal Energy
• Updated Visualizer renamed to Result

• PxrStylizedHatching:

• Triplanar Projections: 8-val progressive blending
• Triplanar Projections: new UI dropdown behavior with default sticky projection
• Toon Shading in Hatching: 1 button replace textures
• Hatching Mask non binary: works with upstream Pxr nodes (ex PxrRamp)
• Updated blending with Black Darkest & White Lightest
• Rainbow test visualizer: updated blending
• Signal Pre Gain/Gamma

• New Override_SignalAOV_CameraRange toggle

• Rename Diffuse Luminance to Signal Luminance

• Conditional visibility on Signal Energy From the dropdown, based off AOV based on Camera Range (since its ignored when on)
• Conditional visibility on Signal Energy From the dropdown, based off Camera Range (since its ignored when on)

• Re-Re-arranged order of Camera Range page controls to under Signal AOV

• New UI page for Color, Masking, Output

• Extended help for Texture Sets

• Rework of Camera Range Hatching functionality: works as a separate mode with other Visualizer modes, not a separate Visualizer only option

• Camera Range Hatching works with Signal Pre Gain/Gamma & Spline

• Fix Visualizer Hatching Blend to not be always red

• Fix Hatching Mix to work with Visualizer mode "Hatching on Beauty"

• New hatching_aov_channel drop-down choice for RGB

• Support daisy chain of custom AOV & RGB channel for each Hatching node

• Visualizer Hatching On Beauty (instead of Hatching Final)

• New hatching_aov_string custom user AOV per node if daisy chained

• New Toon_Colors_Switch functionality for Toon Shading overrides textures

• Updated Visualizer renamed to Result
• Invert Signal feature
• UI page & naming improvements

• PxrStylizedLines:

• • Algorithm optimization for Line Thickness & Dilate+Sort, speed improvements

  • New Distort Lines feature

    • Works with PxrStylizedControl Distort data

    • New NPRdistort AOV requirement

  • Updated Visualizer renamed to Result
  • UI page & naming improvements

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Look Differences

All the look differences below are in RIS in RenderMan 25 compared to RenderMan 24.  In XPU, we continue to make fixes to make it a closer match to RIS.

• The roughness parameter in LamaHairChiang has been reparameterized to produce a more linear response.
• The default longitudinal roughness values in LamaHairChiang have changed from 0.2 0.3 0.3 to 0.13 0.27 0.27.  (The azimuthal roughness is unchanged at 0.35).
• Some parameters in the set of the MaterialX Lama nodes have changed their name. Specifically, the "color" and "normal" names have been renamed to avoid conflict with some OSL keywordsto avoid conflict with some OSL keywords.

Changes in Behavior

• Aggregate Volumes are now the default in RIS, and the only supported volume workflow in XPU.  Each of our integrations in the DCCs has been enhanced to automatically add volumes to the global volume aggregate.  You can create different volume aggregate groups manually.

Deprecations

We have deprecated the C++ out-of-the-box patterns in favor of an equivalent set of OSL patterns.  The new patterns have the same names and functionality as the old patterns, so no changes to your networks are necessary.  We now provide OSL patterns because they run in both XPU and RIS, whereas the C++ patterns only worked with RIS.

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• macOS/Apple Silicon: The denoiser is not supported on Apple Silicon, even with Rosetta.  RMAN-20408
• If your image has NaNs from either RIS or XPU, the denoiser will fail on macOS and Windows.
• The denoiser can only cannot denoise images from XPU on Linux.  For Linux, Windows, and macOS Intel machines, the , it currently produces blurry images.  The denoiser works for RIS.XPU is not ouputting AOVs with motion vectors, which will reduce the cross-frame denoising quality. 

RIS and XPU

• Color Management: Although we have upgraded to the VFX Reference Platform 2021, there are still color management limitations:
  • IT does not support OCIO 2.0 configs yet.  RMAN-19921
• MaterialX: Material layering is not supported.  RMAN-20365

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