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Welcome to RenderMan 22.0 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 22.0.
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 (New!)
- RenderMan ProServer 22.0
Please see the release notes below for all the new capabilities and known issues!
What's New
The New Preset Browser
- Preset Browser for Materials and Environments
- Multi-threaded Katana Scenegraph traversal (faster time-to-first-pixel)
- Multi-threaded Alembic_In_Prman (improves speed when reading multiple alembics)
- Live add, delete and transform for geometry
- Live updates for light-linking
- Live light deleting
- Instanced lights
- Light array support
- Can assign light shader to geometry using MaterialAssign
- Cone angle now visualized on Viewer Modifiers
- 64-bit object IDs, consistent across disk/live/preview renders
Additional Changes
Miscellaneous Changes
- Cannot set material at instance source location
- RIB Include has been removed
- RfK will now read args files for custom integrators
- Integrators are now configured via the PrmanIntegratorSettings node
- "insertWhen" directives for config.xml are removed pending new configuration
- Parameter Layout has been removed from PrmanGlobalStatements and PrmanObjectStatements
- Deprecated:
- "prmanGlobalSettings.plugin.instanceSourceMode"
- "prmanGlobalSettings.commandArguments.numThreadModeProcs"
- "textures" attribute group
Known Limitations
Live Rendering
- Updates to attributes will cause interactive motion blur to fail to render. The render must be restarted.
Creating a mesh light from existing geometry will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.
- Monitor performance can lag behind edits for large scenes
- Creating a mesh light from existing geometry will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.
- Volume edits will break the volume render.
- Adding a portal light to a dome light doesn't delete the dome light
- Cannot Live Render from Viewer camera
- Cannot change a geometry primitive type during live rendering (e.g. from NURBS to polymesh)
- When traversal is parallel, edits to a live material will affect only a subset of assigned geometry unless all of the assigned geometry starts out live or is made live at least once during the live render session.
Alpha limitations
- If the environment variable RMAN_SHADERPATH or RMAN_RIXPLUGINPATH is set and doesn't include the default paths from RMANTREE then the default prman shaders are not found.
- New parallel Alembic_In_Prman not supported yet with Importomatic
- Prman's errorHandlers are not supported
- Dicing cameras do not work
- Deformation motion blur for blobbies and volumes not yet supported
- NURBS trim curves don't render
- Display and Sample Filters not yet supported
- Lights in nested instances do not render
- Checkpoint + recovery not yet functional
- Projections do not render correctly
- Stereo cameras do not render
- Holdouts not available
- Baking not available
- Clipping planes not available
- Polygons with holes not supported
- Light filter linking not supported
- Live udpates to ROI and crop window not supported
- Display "interactiveDisplayOptions" not supported
- Deep output type not supported
- Integer AOVs are not available in RenderOutputDefine
- Material assignment to archives do not function correctly in Alpha
- Alembic pass-through via AlembicIn_prman and Alembic proxy support in Viewer
- Env var for DSO Procedurals
- Instanced lights with filters using the "Light Filter" coordsys have incorrect transform
- Material matrix parameters of type double are not supported
- Material matrix array parameters
- Attribute "geometry.flip_t" is not currently supported
- Katana 3.0 only: Volumes and blobbies not yet functional.
- Katana 3.0 only: Viewer light viewer plugins and light modifier plugins not yet functional
Katana Limitation
- When a Prune node is added at the end of the node graph, right above the Render node, we do not receive an edit from Katana. If a no-op node (e.g. Merge) is inserted above the Render node and the Prune is added above that then the delete edit is received and the Prune works properly.