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Welcome to RenderMan for Blender 25!

This new release of RenderMan for Blender 25 (RfB) continues where the RenderMan 24 version left off.  RenderMan for Blender takes advantage of the RenderMan 25 toolset, including XPU™, Stylized Looks, and MaterialX Lama.  See the RenderMan Release Notes for a list of all of the new changes.

This current release offers support for:

• Blender 2.93 LTS
• Blender 3.0.x
• Blender 3.3.x
• Blender 3.5.x
• Blender 3.6 LTS

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

What's New

RenderMan for Blender has been extended to support all of the features of RenderMan 24, including:

• Blender's "Persistent Data" option is now supported. This is mostly useful in batch rendering where for subsequent frames only differences in the scene are calculated, rather than re-generating the whole scene. Note, this option is off by default.
• For external/batch rendering using Blender Batch style, there is a new Frame Chunking option, which specifies how many frames each blender process will render (previously, each blender process would only do one frame).
• We now auto load the Blender's builtin Node Arrange addon. This allows for auto arranging nodes in the shader graph.  Two of the operators have been added to the RenderMan right click context menu.
• You can now use the Qt version of the preset browser and texture manager, which matches what is available in the other RenderMan DCC plugins. To use the Qt version, go to the addon preferences and change UI Framework from Native to Qt

Changes

• Scene translation time has been improved. In some cases, as much as 27% speed improvement has been seen.
• IPR to "it" is no longer a separate setting. To IPR to "it", right click in the Viewport, and go to RenderMan->Render->IPR to it.
• Support for fluid meshes has been added.
• We now export two new user attributes: "user:blender_is_instance" and "user:blender_instance_uv". If "user:blender_is_instance" is set to 1, this indicates that the current object is an instance.
• For subdivision meshes, you can now select a face map to act as holes for your mesh (note, this does not work in XPU).
• Socket names for terminal nodes (ex: RenderMan Material, Bxdf etc) have been renamed. For example, old name (Bxdf), new name (bxdf_in). This is to match the names used in our other DCC plugins.
• Editing attributes or options during IPR should be faster.
• For meshes, exporting of the tangent and bitangent vectors is now off by default. 

• The default Subsurface Model for PxrSurface has changed from "Jensen Dipole" to "Exponential Path Traced". If you would like to revert the default back to "Jensen Dipole", you can create an override json file for PxrSurface. The json file would look something like this:

  {
      "name": "PxrSurface.args",
      "params": [
          {
              "name": "subsurfaceType",    
              "default": 0,
              "always_write": true
          }
      ]
  }

  See Customizing Blender on how to install this override file.

• Volumes are now added to the "global volume aggregate" by default. If you want to turn off this behavior, turn off the "Global Volume Aggregate" checkbox on volume object properties.

• The clapboard icon in the viewport will now first display an option to either render in the viewport or to "it"

• For float ramps, you can now select the interpolation type to be used

• You can now change the zoom factor for the Enhance operator in the addon preferences

• We now draw the texture map for gobo and cookie light filters, if the draw textured lights option is turned on

• The External Rendering panel has been renamed to Batch Rendering

• We now use "it" for the preview image task for our batch render jobs, instead of "sho".

  
  

Bug fixes

• Fixed issues with instancing using geometry nodes.
• Fixed issue where channels in the stylized output were in random order
• Fixed issue where the FOV was not correct when the camera sensor width was not default, and viewport was in perspective mode
• Fixed issue where using the cookie or gobo light filters was slow in the viewport
• Fixed numerous issues with group nodes in the shader graph.
• Frame step setting should not be respected when batch rendering in RIB mode.
• Fixed issues with light linking when a light or an object are no longer in the scene.
• Fixed issue where normals and vectors were not editable in the shader graph.
• Fixed issue where the viewport render progress bar color was incorrect.

• "it" inspector was displaying the wrong min/max samples for IPR

• Various fixes for the package scene operator

• Fix the viewport drawing of gobo and cookie light filters

• Fixed a bug where UDIM textures from linked collections was not working

  
  

Source Code

You can download the source code for RenderMan for Blender here: https://github.com/prman-pixar/RenderManForBlender

Changes in RenderMan for Blender 25.1

• Blender 3.1 to 3.5 are now officially supported
• Support for 2.83 has been dropped. The minimum version supported is 2.93.

Changes in RenderMan for Blender 25.2

Changes:

• Changing the diffuseColor parameter when using PxrDiffuse should now update the viewport color of the object, similar to PxrSurface.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug where perspective view was incorrectly taking into account the render camera's shift_x and shift_y properties.
• Fixed issue where <br> was not getting correctly substituted in the tooltips
• Fixed a bug where blender_batch would fail when using Blender 3.5
• Fixed an issue with using numpy.int when using Blender 3.5
• Fixed a bug where node names with a ':' character in them would cause shading errors
• Fixed a bug where updating the parameters of any stylized filters would not update correctly during IPR.

Note, RenderMan 25.2 should work with the just released Blender 3.6 LTS