Miscellaneous and Important Changes 

• The viewport has an optional progress bar with render time and user-definable infos
• When Hypershade was open while running IPR, selecting a new piece of geometry would trigger an unnecessary edit
• Added a new preference to prevent some RenderMan extension attributes from appearing in the channel box. A Maya restart is necessary for the pref to take effect
• There is a new playblast button in the viewport that will display playblasting options. The animation can be automatically opened in "It", fcheck, movie player, a custom app of your choice or not at all
• Viewport preferences have been moved to a new Viewport tab in the Preferences dialog
• *To avoid token substitution issues in file path attributes, we temporarily added a new pref in the User Interface section that allows users to disable File Path Editor support. Maya's File Path Editor will not recognize RenderMan nodes anymore but string substitution will work as expected. Please bear with us while we are working with Autodesk towards a more satisfactory solution

Fixes

• Fixed a bug on windows where an imported rib file could end up with an undesired backslash in the file name that would result in the rib archive not being found at render time
  

• Renaming shaders and shading group nodes now has the expected effect in RfM.  In particular, renaming a shading group back to a previously used name was behaving oddly
  

• Mayabatch renders will now include the "prman" tag when batch rendering via Tractor
  

• Maya's leather, granite, and Brownian patterns could look different in renders after restarting Maya
  

• Fixed a bug where animated Xgen wasn't updating when doing batch render via RIB file
  

• Xgen palettes could unnecessarily get exported extra times
  

• Fixed a very rare ABC parsing bug that would occur when a node is not named
  

• The alembic solo function has been improved: double-click to solo a path, re-double-click to un-solo it

• Specifying a Reference Camera for dicing now works. It's available globally under the Advanced tab, or on geometry nodes, under the Geometry section

• Fixed an expression evaluation error cause by new lines in PxrSeExpr expressions
  

• Texture Manager

  • Fixed a number of bugs when adding images or directories of images to the texture manager
    

  • The texture manager now offers to load all images in sub-directories, if there are sub-directories
    

  • The texture manager now rejects files with unknown extensions. A warning will be output with the file name
    

• Preset Browser

  • Fixed configuration-specific incorrect scaling of menu fonts in the preset browser
    

  • Fixed incorrect gamma correction of preset browser preview renders
    

  • The preset browser will now correctly generate a preview image when saving a light rig

• The render globals could fail to build when a scene contains old pre-22.0 nodes. We now run the scene conversion automatically if we detect a problem.

• Displays and Display Channels coming from referenced scenes are now ignored.

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 
• Playblast on Windows does not automatically play in "it", open the sequence manually
  

  
  

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