Soul © Disney/Pixar

Welcome to RenderMan 24.0

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Hello, and welcome to the release notes for RenderMan 24 .0!  RenderMan 24 is focused on look development and enhancing the visual richness of your renders, both within RIS itself , as well as and via our initial release of RenderMan XPU™.

Please dive right into the release notes below for more detailed information on the latest version of your favorite renderer!.

Major Features in RenderMan 24.0

• XPU™ - Pixar’s new hybrid CPU + GPU rendering technology makes its first debut outside the studio in RenderMan 24.   This next-gen rendering engine is being adopted internally , already in use at Pixar for look development work and will now be , is available to commercial RenderMan customers as well for similar tasks.  Stylized Looks is available only in the Commercial version of RenderMan.RenderMan customers
  
  

• Lama - A state of the art material layering system developed at Industrial Light & Magic introduces a modular approach to building material networks and includes recent shading R&D work on dispersion and energy conservation and dispersion.
  
  

• Stylized Looks™ - Move beyond physically based shading and lighting and into a world where you can easily create a variety of styles for your projects - create unique styles thanks to Non-Photorealistic rendering. With Stylized Looks you You can non-destructively control outlines, create sketch patterns, and develop a huge wide range of unique looks, including Anime, by using the same familiar toolset.  Stylized Looks is available only in the Commercial version of RenderMan.
  
  

• Interactive Instrumentation and statistics - Watch your rendering resource usage live, thanks to a completely redesigned statistics system with focus on that prioritizes interactivity and extensibility.
  
  
• OpenColorIO - Robust support for the industry standard ACES color management system and other color spaces in all bridge products, including the interactive RenderMan Image Tool.
  
  
• New patterns, such as PxrHexTileManifold and PxrPhasorNoise  - We are continually working to provide more artistic options for your look development, in this case, a Hex Tiling manifold and a new noise pattern called Phasor Noise.  The technology within these patterns has seen production proven use used within different entities of the Disney organization, including Pixar and ILM. New with this release are production-proven technologies Hex Tiling Manifold and Phasor Noise.
  
  
• Light Baking - Greatly enhance your real-time and VR rendering needs by baking your lighting to 2D texture maps or Point Clouds. Clouds 
  
  
• Professional Artist Tools - Support for Maya, Blender, Katana, and Houdini, including new support for LPEs and AOVs in Solaris, Houdini’s USD-centric toolset.

• Patterns are now OSL - We have converted the great majority of RIS' C++ patterns to OSL.   This conversion allows us to share code between RIS and XPU, which in turn gives you confidence that the renders you see from RenderMan XPU are representative of what you will see in RenderMan RIS.   C++ patterns are still supported, but they will only work in RIS.
  
  

• RenderMan for Blender - New support for cutting edge RenderMan features in the popular open source content creation tool
  

  
  

• Better Sampling -   New blue  Blue noise dithering improves the visual appearance of noise by organizing the sampling pattern distribution, resulting in a perceptually cleaner image sooner.
  

RenderMan XPU™

Pixar’s hybrid solution for CPU + GPU rendering combines computing uses heterogeneous computing resources to accelerate production path-tracing. Starting from a system architecture that can leverage the latest developments in many-core CPU and GPU hardware, separately or in combination, RenderMan XPU™ is being built to handle the scale and complexity of Pixar’s feature animation projects. Its first use in the studio has been focused on detailed look-development tasks, and this integration into Pixar’s pipeline was a significant milestone, with more roles and capabilities to come. We are excited to begin sharing this ongoing development work with our commercial customers.

For further details about RenderMan XPU™, see the following documentation sections:

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