Contents
Welcome to RenderMan for Maya 22!
This latest release of RenderMan for Maya 22 (RfM), includes a number of features to address feedback as well as some fixes to RenderMan for Maya workflow and performance.
Please see the release notes below for all the new capabilities and known issues! You may also wish to visit the migration page for selected highlights.
Now in RfM, problems caused by the presence of non-ascii characters in file paths (diacritics, etc.), RfM will error early (fail to load) with an informative message and warn if rendering resources are loaded from non-ascii paths. Please avoid accents, symbols, spaces, and other non-standard naming conventions in file paths, source files, and user names.
What's New
- New Viewport Playblast Options – Improved integration with the Maya Viewport allows for better playblasts for approval
- Added support for swatch and material viewer rendering – These render via scenegraph, and only work when IPR is not running. Swatch rendering is disabled by default. Enable swatch rendering in the RenderMan preferences under the "workflow" tab
Miscellaneous and Important Changes
When Hypershade was open while running IPR, selecting a new piece of geometry would trigger an unnecessary edit
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
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
Xgen : Xgen will crash during live rendering unless you set Window > Preferences > Xgen > Multithreading to "off" (unchecked).