RenderMan for Katana (RfK) capitalizes on the changes made for newer versions of Katana and continues full support of the latest RenderMan ProServer 22.0.
We're excited to have improved Live Rendering. All manner of changes and edits can be made during a Live Rendering session. Waits are minimal and results are stunning, the renderer will continue to refine your image continuously should you take a coffee break and pick up where you left off on your return. We've worked hard to avoid making the artist restart the render to see updates and stability is improved.
This current release offers support for:
Please see the release notes below for all the new capabilities and known issues!
The New Preset Browser
Dicing cameras are now specified as a camera's scenegraph location. The "worldcamera" and "framecamera" options are no longer supported. This also removes the need to add the dicing camera to a RenderOutputDefine to use the full camera path.
There is a new node called PrmanCameraSettings for setting camera settings
Added new offscreen displacement bound primAttribute, please see: displacementbound:offscreen
Arbitrary clipping planes are now supported
Reorganized the PrmanObjectStatements node to improve clarity and workflow
The global traversal setting "flattenInstanceSources" indicates whether instance sources should be flattened internally in the renderer. By default this is on which is the most efficient and flexible for the common case. Disabling this option allows deeper nesting of instance sources with the caveat that RenderMan only supports 4 levels of nesting, and it prevents per-instance variation on instance source children. This can be overridden locally by the local PrmanObjectStatements parameter - "traversal.flattenInstanceSource" See the documentation on Instancing for an explanation of benefits and limitations
OpenEXR outputs containing "Ci,a" as the first four channels will now write out an EXR with R,G,B,A as the first four channels (i.e. "asrgba" will be enabled for all beauty renders).
Added extensibility to RfK's procedural argument parsing. Now RfK will look for an attribute "argsConversionFunc" which is the name of a attribute function for custom argument conversion
Add support for prman command line options "woff", "logfile", and "loglevel"
RfK will now use the basis from the alembic file unless overridden by the curve.basis setting in PrmanObjectStatements (NOTE: only supported with AlembicInPrman initially)
The default type in PrmanOutputChannelDefine is now "color"
Live render edits to ROI / cropWindow now use the intersection of the two attributes
Alembic cameras now use the camera settings from prmanGlobalStatements
OSL parameters now have connection type checking for the inputs and ouputs of PrmanShadingNode
OSL parameters support a "tag" hint in the metadata to allow users to specify a connection type for the parameter. For multiple types on outputs, use a "|" to delimit the options (eg "struct|manifold")
RfK now supports connections between any color, normal, point, and vector parameters
Creating a mesh light from existing geometry will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.