True Interactive Rendering

Get more done without having to start a new render. Your changes are immediately rendered from Maya without an intermediate stage or exporting to RIB. Change parameters, import or update assets, update options, and even change LPE while seeing your results update.

Render to Viewport 2.0

Now you can render Render interactively directly to the Maya viewport by choosing RenderMan as your renderer. Make scene changes, edit parameters and more without having to restart the render.

Improved

It's no longer necessary to add RenderMan attributes one-by-one in the interface. We now supply the relevant controls in a RenderMan rollout on Maya nodes, eliminating guesswork and clicks.

Faster Ray Tracing

Render more quickly than before! Tuned to improve speed and agility, the RenderMan ray tracing core lets users make decisions as they work.

Interactive

Using Xgen's native interactive grooming tools, get immediate feedback on your creations. Change styles, colors, and more while results update continuously.

Creation of AOVs and LPEs

The streamlined interface for creating AOVs and custom LPEs is the single location to define the outputs you need for post processing workflows that updates during live rendering.

Analytic Area Lights

Area Lights are a powerful way to create physically accurate lighting while optimizing sampling budgets and, in turn, performance. PRMan's area lights support light filters, as well as light-linking, groups, per-group AOVs, and IES profiles and portals.

Global Illumination

Sometimes called "Indirect Illumination," RenderMan for Maya supports Global Illumination effects, subtle diffuse shading effects that are created by sampling the lighting of a scene many times from a given point. This technique can yield highly realistic results. Occlusion, which merely samples the "coverage" of a point (and is cheaper than Indirect Illumination), is also supported automatically or through the PxrOcclusion Integrator.

Volume Rendering

RfM includes PRMan's first class volumetric rendering capabilities, enabling the creation of volumetric effects using OpenVDB 45.0, including Maya's Fluid Effects, with full PRMan support - motion blur, multi-scattering, non-homogenous, etc.

True Curved Surfaces

Tessellation settings are never an issue with RenderMan when rendering NURBS and subdivision surfaces. Since RenderMan renders true curved surfaces, NURBS and subdivision surfaces will never have faceting artifacts. Maya's tessellation mode settings are simply ignored and the benefits of RenderMan are immediately realized.

Subsurface Scattering

RenderMan for Maya supports subsurface scattering, an important effect for realistically rendering translucent materials, like skin, flesh, fat, fruits, milk, marble, and many others. Subsurface scattering is responsible for effects like color bleeding inside materials, or the diffusion of light across shadow boundaries. RfM includes support for path-traced subsurface scattering through materials shipped with RenderMan.

Secondary Outputs

RenderMan for Maya supports secondary outputs (AOVs, or Arbitrary Output Variables), which can be any arbitrary information contained in a shader. Users may also take advantage of Light Path Expressions (LPE) for powerful control over outputs.

Studio Quality RenderMan Shaders

RenderMan ships with the same shaders use by Pixar on their feature films. This allows artists to bring the full power of RenderMan to their projects, providing a higher level of control than what is possible using Maya's built in materials.