Contents
Welcome to RenderMan 23.5!
This release introduces improvements to the previous RenderMan. A new method for temporal blur of volumes is included and can improve performance in fantastic ways on some scenes. More savings can be found in using meshlights when it comes to memory consumption and convergence.
Please dive right into the release notes below for more detailed information on the latest version of your favorite renderer!
New Features in 23.5
Fixes
Fixed a threading bug that would cause a crash when many alembic archives were rendered together
Previously, the PxrSurface bxdf's user AOVs would be black when all its lobe gains are 0. This is no longer the case
- Adjusted the precision of ray/curves intersections to prevent very small curves (1e-4 in length) from fragmenting/disappearing partially
Fixed several bugs where the adaptive sampler may interact poorly with checkpointing and not recover all of its state. Validation is now more thorough when warning if any channels driving the adaptive sampler are not going to be included in any checkpoint images
Miscellaneous Changes
Mesh lights and emissive volumes are now importance sampled according to relative power over the surface/volume. For volumes in particular this can greatly
improve the convergenceThe memory consumption of volumetric meshlights has been substantially reduced, by at least 2X and up to 30X or more depending on the data
Known Limitations
Interactive/Live Rendering Limitations
- Bucket size cannot be changed during live rendering
- Changes to Presence do not update when using the opacity cache option
- Motion Blur will disappear during interactive rendering with scene changes
- Objects are not re-diced during interactive camera edits
- Mesh lights cannot be interchanged as geometry without a restart
RenderMan Pro Server
- When baking illumination sample filters and display filters are not currently supported and may lead to a crash.
- PxrUnified integrator is currently experimental as it does not yet support all the standard rendering features.
- Meshlights cannot be instanced.
- Load-on-demand procedurals are not supported anymore, all procedurals are now loaded immediately.
- We do not read point data from OpenVDB files.
- PxrSurface back diffuse color is not output to the albedo color AOV.
- Analytical lights placed inside volumes may yield artifacts when made visible to the camera. As a work around, the light camera visibility should be turned off, and a geometry with a similar shape should be used (visible to camera, invisible to transmission and indirect rays), with the proper emissive BxDF.
- Using the ' . ' character in the handle for an OSL shader could cause unpredictable results during re-rendering.
- Per-Instance baking is not supported, only the reference instance.
- 3d baking: no direct bake-to-ptex support.
- PxrBakePointCloud cannot directly render ptex.
- Sample/Display filter plug-ins do not have access to lighting services for light dependent effects, e.g. lens flare.
- Adding new mesh light on existing geometry during IPR results in double geometry.
- Motion blurred polygons do not motion blur normals when deformed. Use Subdivision meshes instead.
- When attempting to access an array primvar, you must first check the size of the array primvar and allocate the appropriate space. Not doing so may lead to a crash.
Points and curves cannot be used as geometric lights.