Welcome to RenderMan 22.2. This release introduces improvements to the previous RenderMan.
Please dive right into the release notes below for more detailed information on the latest version of your favorite renderer!
Use Emissive Volumes as a Light Source — A new option on PxrVolume allows the renderer to sample emissive volumes as light sources. This improves performance for scenes where the volume contributes to lighting, like fire and explosions illuminating their surroundings. The below image shows off versus on with the same settings.
Volume as light off then on
A New Analytic Cylinder Light – A new PxrCylinderLight is included for rendering things like fluorescent tubes and lightsabers.
Added support for a Deep Matte File – Using the PxrCamera, you can specify a previously rendered EXR with deep or shallow data to then control the propagation of rays in the scene either by depth (deep) or as a render mask (shallow EXR with Alpha)
The renderer now supports true volumetric geometric lights. Setting the __islight parameter on PxrVolume to the value 1 will now signal to the renderer that the volume should be treated as an emissive light source that will participate in next event estimation. In most cases, this will lead to reduced noise and faster convergence for parts of the scene illuminated by the volume (potentially including the volume itself)
Improved handling of NaNs in albedo channels when denoising
Terminal stats will once again show the full channel list as the display mode for each render output
Geometric meshlights can now be created by attaching the special parameter "int __islight" to a Bxdf that implements the EmitLocal method, and setting the value of the parameter to be 1
Added a new flag to the denoiser to help select the GPU index to use. Calling the denoiser with `denoise --list-gpus` will now produce a result like:
0: Quadro M6000, 1114MHz, 12212MB
on stdout with one line per device. Note this may not list any device where CUDA is disabled despite being capable
Attribute "dice" "string offscreenstrategy" now accepts "planarprojection" (the default regular dicing strategy) as a way of explicitly opting out of the default "viewfrustumdistance" offscreen strategy
The default number of images that "it" will store in memory has been increased from 40 to 100. Using high numbers of AOVs would rapidly degrade performance. The setting remains in the Preferences dialog if further tuning is required
OSL isconnected() shadeop will now return 2 for down-connections to non-OSL nodes (e.g. C++ BXDF's)
Many simple EXR viewers can't recognize that Ci.{r,g,b} should be displayed as red, green and blue. The "EXR no AOV" option in 'it' now also substitutes the name Ci.r' for 'R' etc. Also provide a Float and Half choice for "no AOV" exports. The regular Export EXR options maintain the layer names as rendered for beauty and AOVs. This should make exporting IPR images and sending them to your (insert mobile device or preview software) easier
Fixed a bug where editing a geometry master instanced inside a group would yield a crash
Error codes returned by RixTexture::GetLastError() would sometimes erroneously refer to an unrelated texturing call. This meant texture shading plugins (such as PxrTexture) would not use missing colors to fill result entries when they should have done, yielding unitialized data
There was a bug in the automatically computed trace bias for non-uniformly scaled objects. This has been fixed
Fixed a bug where in some cases, the renderer would be provided with invalid values in transform matrices, yielding invalid instances bounds
A problem has been fixed with inconsistent normals on highly detailed, pretessellated, undisplaced subdivision meshes, particularly near extraordinary features such as creases
(To Tractor) Fix an issue that prevented rendering to "it" when spooling batch render jobs to Tractor
Fixed bugs in recovering from checkpoints, particularly when an EXR uses asrgba
Ray hit footprints and hence texture filter sizes on pretessellated displaced Catmark subdivision surfaces were wrong. This has been fixed and they now match RenderMan 21
Fixed a rare bug where the combination of deformation and rotation motion could result in clipped motion blur trails when the number of motion samples varied across objects in the scene
A bug in the PxrDispTransform node resulting in incorrect displacement directions for Zbrush and Mudbox vector displacement has been fixed
A bug where dPdu and dPdv in flat curves had wrong magnitude and may have resulted in wrong bump mapping or texture filtering in flat curves geometry
Deformation motion blurred volumes don't currently work with densityFloatPrimVar or densityColorPrimVar. You will need to use a PxrPrimVar node connected to densityFloat and densityColor instead
The Centos KDE style "Oxygen" installs a version of Qt and sets the user's environment variable QT_PLUGIN_PATH forcing "it" and LocalQueue to attempt to load an incompatible Qt library. Either avoid installing the Oxygen theme or unset QT_PLUGIN_PATH before running "it" or LocalQueue. Other KDE styles may also install this theme. |