This latest release of RenderMan for Maya 22 (RfM), includes a number of features to address feedback as well as some fixes to RenderMan for Maya workflow and performance.
Please see the release notes below for all the new capabilities and known issues! You may also wish to visit the migration page for selected highlights.
Now in RfM, problems caused by the presence of non-ascii characters in file paths (diacritics, etc.), RfM will error early (fail to load) with an informative message and warn if rendering resources are loaded from non-ascii paths. Please avoid accents, symbols, spaces, and other non-standard naming conventions in file paths, source files, and user names. |
OSL now supports batched SIMD execution, enabled in the advanced render globals of RFM, this may become a default in a future release. The current default is off. Please see the OSL documentation under Performance
There is a new Deep Rendering Quality control in the advanced section of the RenderMan globals. It controls the sample decimation and by extension the final file size
The Alembic browser: double-click a an item in the list to solo it in the viewport. To show all, either double-click the top node or clear the "Geometry Path" fleid of the gpuCache node. This has no influence on the final render
To help troubleshoot configuration problems caused by the presence of non-ascii characters in file paths, RfM will error early (fail to load) with an informative message and warn if rendering resources are loaded from non-ascii paths. Until the renderer is updated to support unicode strings, this is the current way to warn users
Added a new "int polygon:smoothdisplacement" attribute to support crack-free displacement on polygon meshes with hard edges
You can now specify custom Tractor settings via the RfM JSON
configuration files. An example of how the settings are specified:
"tractor_cfg": { "engine": "buzz", "port": "8081", "user": "rman_user" }, |
* "engine" specifies the hostname of the machine that is running the Tractor engine (string).
* "port" specifies the port number the engine is running on (string).
* "user" is what user the job should be submitted as (string). Note, if this is an empty string we submit the job as the current logged in user.
The preset browser now uses RfM's preferred text editor if defined and available
The RfM scene updater script will try to remove old RenderMan nodes from your scene, this is destructive, save a new copy of your scene
Tractor jobs spooled on Windows can now run on Linux and OSX blades given a reasonable dirmap setting. Dirmaps in rfm can be set in Documents\rfm\config\rfm.json on Windows
MASH networks which contain a MASH_Dynamics or MASH_BulletSolver node now behave as expected
A bug that caused Xgen to fail when using more than two motion samples for motion blur has been addressed
You can find a useful Doxygenated developer documentation in the Developers' Guide under RfM2
Xgen : Xgen will crash during live rendering unless you set Window > Preferences > Xgen > Multithreading to "off" (unchecked). |