Welcome to RenderMan for Houdini 23.6!

This release of RenderMan for Houdini (RfH) 23, includes a number of new features and bug fixes that address feedback.

New Features in 23.6

Fixes

• fixed a bug when setting the Icon during args parsing

• Fix file dependency path for RfH TOP nodes.

• fix bug where RenderMan parameters were ignored inside locked HDAs

• removing single quotes in conditional visibility string in RfH. only double quotes or none are valid.

• incorrect math calculating velocity transform blur.

• channel references for domelight are not working with relative paths on the first frame rendering via hbatch. could be a complicated houdini bug, but can easily work around by getting the full path before setting the references. 

• Fix incorrect screen window calculation when pixelaspect=2

• Fixes to bokeh settings (incorrect types)

• Fixed transform calculations for blend and bone obj nodes
• fix bug that did not read time correctly to expand $F in string paths
• Curves with a basis that requires duplicating endpoints (we do this so the curve appears to extend to the endpoints) would look wrong when motion blur was enabled and "width" was defined, because the primvars at endpoints were ending up being duplicated twice.
• In Solaris - 
  • Fixed a bug where hdPrman would always specify the first field of a vdb file as the density field.
  • Fixed a backdoor workflow where display and sample filters are allowed to come through Hydra as shading nodes
  • Fixed the "Render to MPlay" and "Render to Disk in Background" buttons on the RenderMan LOP
  • Light groups now work in light path expressions (no light selects)
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when running in the usdview that ships with Houdini if the camera was not created with Solaris and lacked certain attributes that we support for Solaris cameras.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some incorrect sample times when more than 3 samples for deforming motion blur

Miscellaneous

• add support for pre and post render hooks via RFHhooks

• bringing back PxrDebugShadingContext hda
•  Improved motion blur support for hdPrman in Solaris

  • Motion blur for meshes, curves, and point particles is now supported through a shared codepath

  • On Render Geometry Settings node there's now a Motion Blur tab under the RenderMan Master Attributes.

  • Velocity blur and enabling/disabling motion blur for objects is now supported through the Render Geometry Settings node

  • Enabling/disabling motion blur works for transforms and geometry

• remove xform_motionsamples and geo_motionsamples from the RenderMan tab (geo and cam) because these are not RenderMan-only parameters and are affecting mantra renders. Now you must manually add if you want to set these parameters on the object.

• emitting all renderman geometry primvars to alembics because RfH doesn't know what type is inside the packed alembic so we need to cover all bases.

• read shop_materialpath in alembic attributes. add bundle to rop to force material export.

• Added back support for the Pause/Resume callbacks in hdprman
• improved viewport lighting
• read abcvelocityscale attribute to scale alembic velocity
• Added baking options to the RenderMan LOP under the Rendering/Render tab
• promoted parameters can have different names now
• add acceleration blur support
• RfSolaris: The camera should now tumble around the mouse cursor when rendering with RenderMan in the viewport
• For hdPrman now just print xcpt messages rather than routing into TF_STATUS, etc.  because depending on the host app those may just get lost.