Miscellaneous and Important Changes 

• Batched OSL execution is enabled by default (on CPUs supporting AVX, AVX2 or AVX512)

• The "normal" AOV contains bump normals instead of geometric normals (Nn). The denoising quality of bump-mapped surfaces has been improved

• Every Maya camera has a matching coordinate system that can be directly referenced. No need to create a place3dTexture anymore when the camera transform is desired

• The transform nodes now have a camera visibility control
• All Maya shape nodes now default to visibleInReflections = 1 (which makes them visible to indirect rays), when RfM is loaded. This includes xgen nodes, gpuCache, etc.
• If RFM_DO_NOT_CREATE_MODULE_FILE is set, the message level is now INFO instead of WARNING
• rmanGlobals has a new button to 'Reload lobe definitions' to update lobe definitions in a scene, useful when importing older scenes
• User lobes "Position" and "Color" have been added to the list of displayChannel presets
• Primvar export
  • Reference primvars (__Pref, __Nref, etc) are now correctly exported to alembic
  • New menu options in the RenderMan menu and in the shelf to manually create reference primvars to be exported to alembic
  • Reference primvars (__Pref, __Nref, etc) are now automatically exported to alembic when a shape has a texture reference object
• The rif statements are not emitted in RIB archives anymore

• Overrides can be disabled in RfM JSON config files using "activate": False in the dictionary definition.

• String substitution now handles Maya namespaces
• It is now possible to define a default value in case an attribute lookup fails: <rmanGlobal.woolala?2.5> -> 2.5 or <rmanGlobal.woolala?2.5:%.03f> -> 2.500. Note that the '?DEFAULT' should always come before the ':%FORMAT' section

• If a dome light is not selected, the preset browser will create a dome light automatically for the user when importing an envmap

Fixes

• Fixed a crash that could occur when scrubbing timeline during IPR for scenes involving MASH meshes
  

• Fixed a crash that could happen when opening a new scene while a render region was active

• Fixed a bug where Maya projection nodes were ignoring the linked camera; placement via a place3dTexture node was working

• Fixed a bug where motion blurred place3dTexture nodes would end up with an extra, bogus motion sample
• Fix occasional infinitely recursive evaluation of conditional visibility
• When importing a material from the preset browser, the preferred Maya material is created when needed
• Fixed bug where render region sometimes needs to be drawn twice before updating
• Fixed a rare AOV UI bug when a display and a displayChannel share the same name
• Fixed a bug where when first importing a rib archive that includes a frame number, the bbox wouldn't update correctly
• Rib archive frame number could be incorrectly detected on import
• Corrected a txmanager bug that would trigger an error message on ptex files
• Fixed occasional "Error occurred during execution of MEL script line 1: line 1: Cannot find procedure "showShadingGroupAE"" message when connecting a RenderMan node to a shadingEngine
• Grid data from vdb files wasn't coming through as primvars when rendered as RiBlobby
• UV linking with Maya file nodes now works
• A bug that cause the -cam flag to not work in Maya batch has been addressed
• Fixed a bug where multiple cameras with the same shape name would cause problems when attempting to render through any of them

• An issue where having a namespace in the camera name was causing issues for batch rendering with RIB has been addressed

Developer Documentation

You can find a useful Doxygenated developer documentation in the Developers' Guide under RfM2

Known Limitations

RenderMan for Maya

• Light Linking volumes is not currently supported
• Only motion blurred meshes and transforms retain their blur after frame changes during IPR
• Deselecting "Receive Shadows" does not work.
• Creating a mesh light from existing geometry during IPR will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.
• We do not support Camera Facing Curves in Xgen
• Xgen will not reflect changes in the Collection
• Limited UDIM texture support in viewport
• Maya Fur Feedback is not supported
  

   

  Warning
  Xgen : Xgen will crash during live rendering unless you set Window > Preferences > Xgen > Multithreading to "off" (unchecked).