Page tree

You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 2 Next »

Contents

Welcome to RenderMan 22.3 for Katana

RenderMan for Katana (RfK) capitalizes on the changes made for newer versions of Katana and continues full support of the latest RenderMan ProServer 22.3.

We're excited to have improved Live Rendering. All manner of changes and edits can be made during a Live Rendering session. Waits are minimal and results are stunning, the renderer will continue to refine your image continuously should you take a coffee break and pick up where you left off on your return. We've worked hard to avoid making the artist restart the render to see updates and stability is improved.

This current release offers support for:

  • Katana 2.6
  • Katana 3.0
  • RenderMan ProServer 22.3

Please see the release notes below for all the new capabilities and known issues!

What's New

 

Additional Changes

 

Miscellaneous Changes

  • Added the option to use "objectdistance" dicing in RfK, see the RenderMan 22.3 release notes for more details
  • You can now edit the "tint" and "intensityMult" parameters of PxrPortalLight in the corresponding "Color" and "Int" columns in GafferThree.  You can also edit the "skyTint" parameter of PxrEnvDayLight in the "Color" column
  • There is a new option in PrmanGlobalStatements - "plugin.deferInstanceSources" which tells RfK not to traverse and build instance sources that aren't instanced
  • The global plugin option "recover" is now correctly emitted to the prman command line
  • Cameras now inherit relevant attributes from /root. The prmanCameraStatements, material, and geometry attributes from /root are merged with those on camera locations.  Additionally, cameras that are children of cameras will inherit the attributes from their parent cameras.  To get the old behavior back, you can set this attribute at /root: info.__prmanOriginalCameraBehavior.
  • Cameras now use the fov from the geometry.fov attribute by default.  You can switch to use the projection shader's fov parameter by setting the prmanCameraStatements.useGeometryFov attribute to 0.  To enable fov motion blur using the geometry.fov attribute's time samples, enable prmanCameraStatements.fovMotionBlur.  These settings are available on the PrmanCameraSettings node.  To get the old behavior back, you can set this attribute at /root: info.__prmanOriginalCameraBehavior
  • Removed the extra blank line in the Render Log after each loaded shader library
  • The page, label, and help hints are now available from the RendererObjectInfo for c++ plugins
  • The default number of parallel traversal threads has been changed from 0 ("automatic") to 4. In many cases this will result in parallel traversal performance
    improvement
  • In the Hydra Viewer, (Katana 3) don't display parent locations that are not included in the Viewer Visibility Working Set

Fixes

  • The RfK preset browser would incorrectly accept network materials that were not above the view node in the nodegraph
  • The "visible" attribute will now work with all types of instancing and with light locations
  • Attributes set under prmanStatements.primAttributes are now correctly applied to renderer procedural locations

 

 

Known Limitations

 

Live Rendering

  • Creating a mesh light from existing geometry will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.

  • Cannot change a geometry primitive type during live rendering (e.g. from NURBS to polymesh)
  • When assigning a material to a Scene Graph location, that location must be enabled in the live render working set

 

Katana Limitation

  • When rendering to "it" from Katana, do not stop the render from "it", abort the render from Katana. Your Katana session may freeze for a time if you abort from "it". If you make this mistake you can restore Katana to operation by terminating the prman render process manually. This will be fixed in a future version. You can also avoid this entirely by rendering to the Katana Monitor.
  • Light Linking volumes is not currently supported
  • We do not receive live render edits from Katana for nodes added at the end of the node graph, right above the Render node.  If a no-op node (e.g. Merge) is inserted above the Render node and the node is added above that then the edit is received.
  • Any live updates will cause interactive motion blur to be disabled. The render must be restarted.
  • PRMan error handlers are not fully supported yet.
  • Instanced lights with filters using the "Light Filter" coordsys have an incorrect transform. The workaround is to promote the light filter to a shared light filter using a light filter reference.
  • There are a few live render limitations in Katana 2.6 that have been resolved in Katana 3.0 based on the improvements to 3.0, typically limitations with live working sets and adding/deleting locations in 2.6