Star Wars: The Last Jedi © and ™ Lucasfilm, Ltd. All Rights Reserved
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Welcome to RenderMan
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22.0!
Welcome to RenderMan
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22. This release introduces improvements to the previous RenderMan in very significant ways
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There are many additions: New lights and materials from Pixar Animation Studios. We've also added amazing new studio light filters, new patterns, and improved displacement. In addition there are changes to APIs and new APIs for the developers. Workflows have been greatly simplified and performance enhancements abound.
There have also been important subtractions:
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Please dive right into the release notes below for more detailed information on the
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latest version of your favorite renderer!
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New Features in
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22.0
Revolutionary New
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New PxrSurface material used by the Pixar Animation Studios in actual production is now included! This includes solutions for all imaginable effects and are physically based but artist-friendly. You may also combine and layer these materials for added flexibility and artistic control.
New Pixar Studio Lighting
New studio lights from actual Pixar productions are also included to compliment the studio workflow and materials. Improved light filters developed in production are included with the studio lighting package. The lighting services API has also been updated and the new lights take advantage with vastly improved performance. Scenes with over 1 million lights render more quickly and easily!We also reintroduce an improved Portal Light for difficult interior lighting situations.
New Integrators
PxrOcclusion is a non-physical integrator that can easily and quickly generate occlusion renders for adding details in post compositing work. This integrator includes many of the controls artists require for tuning the look of their results.
Denoise Improvements
Continued improvements in performance of the Denoise feature improves speed and quality. Also, using Denoise with CUDA capable GPUs could reduce Denoise processing times compared to the CPU. Using the GPU requires CUDA 7.0 (compute capability 2.0 or later) and a capable graphics card with support. GPU denoising can be enabled by default with an automatic fallback to CPU denoising if no compatible device is available. You can specify the GPU to use by index and adding it to the appropriate .json denoise configuration file.
Texture and Point Cloud Baking
It's now possible to bake patterns into 2D textures or point clouds using RenderMan. This allows artists to simplify complex networks to a single result for rendering. This can improve performance by reducing the cost in evaluating these patterns. Point clouds may be converted to ptex as a post process.
Relative Pixel Variance
It's now possible to assign a different Pixel Variance threshold to individual objects to improve render quality on especially troublesome areas visible to camera rays.
PxrDirt
PxrDirt is a new pattern made for artists wanting to create useful effects like procedural dirt maps or weathering. With useful controls and the new PxrBakeTexture pattern, artists can quickly generate and use results instead of hand painting maps.
Transparent Alpha
Shader writers can take advantage of a new feature to accumulate transparent alpha along the path. This allows compositors to use the semi-transparent alpha in later compositing. For example: A car render could composite the final render onto a background without having to "bake in" the background to the windows.
Keep Rendering
Recently introduced: the ability to mark a final render as a checkpoint. This allows the user to pick up a "finished" image and continue to render. Using either an .ini setting or a RIB option, with the later overriding the former, you can render a "completed" EXR with the option to continue as if it's a checkpoint. If neither is present it defaults to off. The final image will essentially be just another checkpoint, rather than a slimmed down image:
/prman/checkpoint/asfinal [bool]
Option "checkpoint" "int asfinal" [0|1]
Additional Features and Improvements Include
- Thin shadow light options allow realistic colored shadows for transparent and refractive objects without needing the overhead of tracing photons.
- Volumes now support deformation motion blur and rendering performance for volumes has been greatly improved.
- Automatic computation of camera lens tilt and shift effects has been added with simple controls in the PxrCamera shader.
- A Deep OpenEXR Display driver has been added.
- Native OSL support is introduced and improves work flow for pattern creation. PxrOSL has been removed to avoid confusion.
- Ptex performance has been improved especially when caching and use multiple threads.
- Statistics output has been improved with more utilization granularity and output with checkpoint renders.
- Many other performance improvements for scenes with volumes, complex transformations, high tessellation settings, and more.
Workflow
RenderMan 22 brings truly interactive rendering that works with the artist from concept to completion.
Artists can continuously render while modeling, animating, texturing, shading and more! Previously artists may have had to restart renders to see their changes to their scene during live or interactive rendering. Many of these roadblocks have been removed so that you can continue to work while seeing the image refine. Importing and exporting assets are now visible in-render as are changes to geometry while modeling, updates to animation, object placement, material and light parameter tweaks, even light path expression authoring!
Examples include:
- Rendering playblasts in RenderMan for client approval on animation
- Placing textures interactively
- Refining light position and parameters
- Authoring Light Path Expressions to capture the right output for post enhancements
- Importing and replacing assets while rendering
- Grooming hair for the perfect look
- Trying new camera angles or framing for the perfect composition
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 Bridge Products — RenderMan for Maya and Katana have been redesigned. Better integration means less looking for options, fewer clicks, and faster images. Render directly to Viewport 2.0 in Maya 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 how we calculate presence on camera rays and results in noise-free partially opaque effects up to a user-specified depth in the integrator.
OpenVDB Updated — PxrVolume provides more sampling options to enhance performance as well as new support for OpenVDB 4.0.
Improved Sampling Stratification – This improves noise reduction, time to converge, and preview renders. Please see the paper on Progressive Multi-Jittered Sample Sequences.
New Adaptive Sampler Option – In addition to the new stratification, we include a new experimental adaptive sampling technique as an option. You may find better convergence at higher Variance thresholds.
Important Differences
- To achieve interactive rendering including geometry edits, RenderMan 22 has a high performance interface for bridge products. However, the Ri interface is still supported, including Ri Procedurals. In particular, Ri editing features are not supported anymore.
- RtToken has been replaced, any string that is passed to the renderer must be a RtUString. Any customer code will need to implement this change.
- Look differences will happen between older layered PxrSurface materials and RenderMan 22, especially subsurface scattering. This is due to the improved layering logic.
- Lights are no longer visible by default in refraction, you must use "int visibleInRefractionPath" [1]
- The default coordinate system known as "current" has changed. "Current" space is context dependent and subject to change
- Displacement is changeable from Object Space (current space) or World Space in shaders, it will not be possible to exactly match previous displacement results.
- Bxdf is in World Space
- Analytic Lights are in Object Space
- Light Filters are in World Space
- Integrators are in World Space
- Sample Filters are in World Space
- All geometry is converted to instance geometry, i.e. everything is now an instance within the core of the renderer
- Attribute identifiers are now 64-bit integer instead of float
- Note that the light cone angle parameter on lights has been corrected to use the correct measurement in degrees from the edges. This will alter the look of older scenes. To match older scenes there's a bit of math involved: newTheta = 90 - atan(2.tan(90 - oldTheta)) (Note that this is radians)
- We do not include the librix standalone library, RixInterfaces is only available through libprman.
- Always camera-facing curves are not supported anymore. Curves without explicit normals are now rendered as cylinders.
- Dtex format is deprecated, use Deep EXR instead and will be removed in the near future.
- Some previous materials have been deprecated or removed
- LM Materials
- PxrGlass
- PxrSkin
- The PxrUPBP integrator has been removed.
There have also been many subtractions designed to improve the user experience through simplification and streamline performance options. In many cases they were a duplicate function and valid options and attributes can be found in the Developer Section of the documentation. These changes may impact your scripts, plugins, pipeline, and more.
Miscellaneous Changes
- A change in the display driver channel order now outputs RGBA instead of ARGB
- The default (current) coordinate space is different. We now render in world space. Previously this was all in camera space. This affects features like the P AOV
- RenderMan can now use more than 64 logical cores on Windows
- Many shading operations are now in object space (displacement is particularly affected and will likely require lookdev or shader changes)
- Any string that is passed to the renderer must be a "UString" or "unique string". Refer to the RtUString Class in the Developer's Doxygen Guide
- Curves with normals are supported, as are round curves. But curves with no normals as a notation for desiring always camera-facing curves is not supported. as such, orientation and reverse orientation for curves is no longer supported
- For subdivision surfaces, face edits higher than depth 1 are not supported
- dPdTime and dPdCameraTime have changed
- All functions in librx have been removed, including RxGetContext
- RixTransform API is deprecated and will be removed soon.
- Added circular bucket/tile order
- A new InvalidateTexture call has been added to RixRiCtl.
- A new mechanism has been added to RixRiCtl to cancel a render
- Default cache limits have been increased to better reflect modern machines
- Texturememory and Geocachememory limits are now 4194304
- Ptexturememory limit is now 32768
- Opacitycachememory is 2097152
- Added motion blurred FOV capabilities and a detail modifier to the PxrCamera plugin
- Camera options such as depth of field and FOV must be specified through a projection plugin.
- Alpha and RGBA color sets are now supported. RGBA color sets are emitted as "color colorSetName" and "float colorSetNameA" to allow for ease of shader binding.
- Increased default precision for RIB export to 9
- Added Attribute "displacementbound" "int offscreen", please see the Primitive Variables section for an explanation
- Improved adaptive sampling when using checkpointing
- JIT compilation of OSL shaders now executes in parallel
- Added support for interactive arbitrary clipping planes
- Volume instancing is fully supported, however, density (and motion blur) cannot be altered per instance.
- Removed the PxrRollingShutter plugin, the functionality exists in PxrCamera
- PxrHairColor allows for either rec709/sRGB or ACEScg for Physical Mode
- Improved texture filtering results, we improved mipmapping level selection at grazing angles.
- Crop windows are no longer limited to the (0,0) to (1,1) square. Going outside the unit square will add overscan
- Cryptomattes now respect the crop window rather than adding black padding. Now they are always autocropped which may reduce size further.
- Cryptomatte now defaults to scanline EXR (ZIPS) output. This improves performance in Nuke at the cost of larger files.
- PxrCryptomatte now supports checkpointing
- Improved transparency handling in PxrCryptomatte
- Improvements in point rendering, more speed and less memory usage reported in many scenes. Note point mesh lights are not supported and points cannot be used as closed volumes
- Improved shadow tracing performance, especially on scenes where lights may not contribute to a point being shaded
- Alembic geometry is treated as instances when "-instanced" flag is specified
- Better handling of OpenVDB containers with zero density
- PxrSurface can now report its IOR when using nested dielectrics, removing the need for users to manually specify the attribute. The attribute is deprecated.
- Bump Adjust Amount is now defaulted to 1 (it was 0) to remove possible artifacts preemptively when a normal is below the horizon
- Bump mapping has been improved to avoid light leaking
- The exrinfo utility now automatically truncates the display of very long strings from the image header. Use its new -full option to show these in full without truncation
- The "-d type" command line option now overrides the display type for all displays, not just the primary one
- Improved the calibration of timing statistics on Linux
- Methods in the the RixRNG.h header have been changed to be more typesafe
- Various fixes to volume rendering in 22 will result in different looks in volume rendering from pervious versions, they may appear (much) brighter depending on lighting circumstance.
- Added a new Primvar for points, falloffpower, float. I f not supplied, or set to zero, the points will have a hard edge. A value of 1 is a "reasonable" value that emulates the usual cosine based falloff; this will likely be the goto value for most people doing volumetric particle effects. Values between 0 and 1 makes the falloff faster, eroding the point faster - point has "less presence". Values higher than 1 (up to infinity) makes the falloff slower to the point of being non-existent.
- Defaulted the following patterns to Object Space:
- PxrPrimvar
- PxrVariable
- PxrManifold3DN
- PxrRoundCube
- PxrManifold3D
- Introduced a new Hider option: "int sampleoffset". This allows several images to be rendered in parallel (with different sampleoffset) and then combined. (Essentially: Users can separate a single render across multiple nodes to share the work and then combine them when complete using a post process.)
- With non-adaptive sampling: Let's say you render four images with 256 samples each, with sampleoffsets 0, 256, 512, and 768. If you combine those four images, you'll get exactly the same image as if you had rendered a single image with 1024 samples.
- With adaptive sampling: Let's say you again render four images, each with "maxsamples" 256, with sampleoffsets 0, 256, 512, and 768. Let's say that due to adaptive sampling, some given pixel only gets 64 pixel samples in each of the four images. Then the combined image has been rendered with sample numbers 0-63, 256-319, 512-575, and 768-831. Due to the stratification of the samples, this is not quite as good as if you had rendered a single image with 256 consecutive samples. (However, it is, of course, quite a bit better than rendering a single image with only 64 samples.)
- Support lights in procedurals. This change allows for:
- lights to be inside of groups and obey the usual instancing rules (one light in a single group master will yield multiple 'lights' when the group is instanced multiple times)
- lights to be inside procedurals
- lights to be inside ObjectBegin/ObjectEnd blocks, included nested ones
Known Rendering Differences
- Hair will have more contrast between lit and unlit areas as an incorrect highlight was corrected in 22
- Incorrect endcaps were fixed on hair and removed for tubes. This has the effect of making the curve slightly shorter by a factor of nearly curveWidth/2 at both the starting point and endpoint of the curve. This makes a bigger difference to short and fat curves
- High frequency bump maps may be different as an issue with filtering was corrected
- Change from "camera" to "world" space changes anisotropy, this should be more correct, objects with specified anisotropic direction should be unaffected
- Mesh lights are half as bright as double contribution was fixed
- Particle Ng was incorrect in previous versions, this alters their illumination which is now correct
- All lights now default to off for Visible in Refraction (initial releases)
- Mesh lights illuminate now even if invisible to all ray types
Known Limitations
Interactive/Live Rendering Limitations
- Crop window edits are restricted to fall inside the original crop window
- Bucket order or size cannot be changed during live rendering
- min and max samples settings cannot be altered during live rendering
- Changes to Presence do not update when using the opacity cache option
- Motion Blur will disappear during interactive rendering with scene changes
- Displacement does not update on changes
- Objects are not re-diced during interactive sessions
- Mesh lights cannot be interchanged as geometry without restart.
RenderMan Pro Server
Important Differences
Reyes Rendering is Removed
- RenderMan is now based on modern raytracing techniques to create a simple path to beautiful images.
- Only the "raytrace" and "bake" hiders are retained in this release.
RSL is Removed
- The RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) has been deprecated. RenderMan will print a warning if used and return black or artifact.
EXR Environment Orientation
- txmake no longer manipulates input images to conform to the OpenEXR latlong specification. An input image is converted directly to an OpenEXR format latlong texture with no image manipulation. The -extraargs exrlatlong flag is no longer needed or supported.
RiPoints as Spheres
- RiPoints without normals are now treated as spheres when ray tracing. P and N values will be as if the point was a sphere. RiPoints cannot be used for shading models which require bump mapping or tangent vectors (i.e. anisotropic specular models).
Better Defaults for Rendering
- The default hider is "raytrace", default bxdf is PxrDiffuse, and the default integrator is PxrDefault.
- Trace displacements is now on by default.
- The shadingrate default has been increased to improve performance since shading quality is not affected.
- A default value for darkfalloff improves rendering performance for many scenes, especially those with dark areas that were potentially over-sampled.
Diffuse and Specular Depth defaults have changed
- Originally introduced as an option, PxrPathTracer now tracks the diffusedepth and speculardepth separately from each other based on which lobe of the bxdf is sampled. Previously rays that have both diffuse and specular contributions increment both the diffuse and specular depths. The new behavior is more intuitive and produces expected results when adjusting the trace:maxdiffusedepth and trace:maxspeculardepth attributes. This comes at the cost of, in some cases, effectively doubling the number of indirect ray bounces which can cause look differences and/or increase render times.
New Ri Calls
- RiDisplace
- RiDisplayFilter
- RiLight
- RiSampleFilter
Deprecated Ri Calls
- RiAreaLightSource
- RiDisplacement
- RiImager
- RiLightSource
New Options
- Hider "bake" has been added for texture/pointcloud baking
Deprecated Options
- Hider "jitter" has been removed as part of REYES
- Camera "focusregion" has been deprecated. Its use will now trigger a warning.
- Option "shading" "int directlightinglocalizedsampling" has been deprecated as part of an improved light sampling scheme.
New Attributes
- Attribute "dice" "float micropolygonlength" has replaced ShadingRate
Deprecated Attributes
- RiShadingRate
- visibility transmissionportal
- visibility usestransmissionportal
- dice nonuniform
- stitch traceenable
- trace importancethreshold
- trace emissionbias
- irradiance maxerror
- irradiance maxpixeldist
- photon estimator
- photon maxspeculardepth
- photon maxdiffusedepth
- photon minstoredepth
- stochastic sigma
- volume refinementstrategies
- volume depthinterpolation
- volume polygonizepartialvoxels
- volume incidentfallback
Miscellaneous Changes
- Changing offsetS/T of each of the X, Y, and Z tri-planar projections in PxrRoundCube to be 0. The old default was an offset of 1.
- By default, RenderMan no longer combines hits across different instances that share the same Bxdf into a single shading context. This is the more correct behavior if shading variation is desired between instances, but may lead to a loss of efficiency otherwise. Attribute "shadegroups" "attributecombining" may be set to "permissive" to re-enable the old behavior if the instances are guaranteed to be identical in shading.
- The intensity of IES profiles is now directly proportional to the number of lumens per lamp (we ignore input watts). If the number of lumens is not specified, we default to 1700 lumens, the equivalent of a 100W incandescent light bulb. Should you wish to revert to the old intensity computation, you can disable this through a new option : 'Option "user" "int iesIgnoreWatts" [0]'
- Heatmap statistics have been improved visually as well as their numerical results.
- Prman now issues a warning and avoids a potential crash when geometry has ST primvars with the wrong type.
- Improved error reporting when a -capture output or inline archive rib buffer exceeds the maximum size supported.
- Changes have been made to improve layering workflow with PxrSurface and PxrLayerMixer.
- The memory requirements for heterogeneous volume rendering has been substantially reduced, especially when using many volume samples during single scattering.
- LocalQueue is now part of the RenderMan distribution.
- An issue with using autocrop and OpenEXR images has been fixed.
- There is now a Delete() callback in the RixLightFactory API.
- Light plugins can now safely return NULL from RixLightFactory::CreateLight method.
- New AOV "float rawID" that passes through integer id values to the display driver unchanged. For example, using: Attribute "identifier" "int id" [4294699949] on an object will result in the display driver receiving a value that is -nan if the bits are interpreted as a float, but the original 4294699949 is interpreted as an unsigned int.
- Portal Lights will now return white if the DomeLight does not have a texture specified.
- PxrDistantLight now has emissionFocus and emissionFocusTint parameters.
- Removed some obsolete Reyes stats.
- Improvements have been made to the thread scheduling for dense procedurals and meshes.
- Displacement bound stats are now available in expert mode.
- OSL shaders can register a nodeid and classification through OSL metadata
- RiVolumes that use DSO plugins no longer use filtered evaluations. This improves performance in some cases.
- Legacy photon mapping has been removed. Please use the PxrVCM integrator instead.
- OSL no longer generates a warning when it fails to find an Attribute or Option value.
- The OSL getattribute() call now supports fetching primitive variables using the "primvar" object name and special PRman built-in variables such as the tangent vector "Tn" via the "builtin" object name.
- RenderMan now supports up to 12 user lobes in LPE. Previously this was limited to 8.
- The integrators are now responsible for managing the emission from camera visible lights. Previously this was handled by a bxdf.
Known Limitations
RenderMan Pro Server
- PxrUnified integrator is currently experimental as it does not yet support all the standard rendering features.
- Meshlights cannot be instanced
- Load on demand procedurals are not supported anymore, all procedurals are now loaded immediately
- We do not read point data from OpenVDB files
- PxrSurface back diffuse color is not output to the albedo color AOV
- Analytical lights placed inside 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.
- Using the ' . ' character in the handle for an OSL shader could cause unpredictable results during re-rendering.
- Instances are Per-Instance baking is not supported for baking, only the reference instance.
- 3d baking: no direct bake-to-ptex support.
- PxrBakePointCloud cannot directly render ptex.
- No RixPTC/pointcloud API (so PxrBakePointCloud cannot read ptc files).
- 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.
- Camera visibility changes are not respected during Live Rendering.
- For PxrUPBP, If the light source is inside a volume, that volume needs to be defined as Volume “box”
- For PxrUPBP, To get a volume caustic, the object casting the caustic needs to have higher intersectpriority than the volume.
- For PxrUPBP, Overlapping heterogeneous volumes are not working yet. (However, overlapping homogeneous volumes do work.) This will be resolved in the future.
- PxrPortal may yield artifacts when generating photons for PxrVCM / PxrUPBP. This will be fixed in a future release.
- Motion blurred polygons do not motion blur normals when deformed. Use Subdivision meshes instead.
- PxrUPBP is no longer supported
- 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 have mesh lights attached to thembe used as geometric lights.
Deformation motion blurred volumes don't currently work with densityFloatPrimVar or densityColorPrimVar. You will need to use a PxrPrimVar node connected to densityFloat and densityColor instead.
Note The Centos KDE style "Oxygen" installs a version of Qt and sets the user's environment variable QT_PLUGIN_PATH forcing "it" and LocalQueue to attempt to load an incompatible Qt library. Either avoid installing the Oxygen theme or unset QT_PLUGIN_PATH before running "it" or LocalQueue. Other KDE styles may also install this theme.