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Welcome to RenderMan 23.0!

Welcome to RenderMan 23. This release introduces improvements to the previous RenderMan in very significant ways.

Please dive right into the release notes below for more detailed information on the latest version of your favorite renderer!

New Features in 23.0

True Interactive Rendering — Rely on RenderMan like never before with the ability to continuously render while you work. We no longer use the intermediate step of rendering to RIB in interactive sessions. See changes immediately and make decisions sooner while refining your artistic choices. RenderMan has the ability to update while artists model scenes, complete layout, perform look development, and much more.  We've removed many of the restrictions that require users restart a render or wait for feedback.


Important Differences

 

There have also been many subtractions designed to improve the user experience through simplification and streamline performance options. In many cases they were a duplicate function and valid options and attributes can be found in the Developer Section of the documentation. These changes may impact your scripts, plugins, pipeline, and more.

 

Miscellaneous Changes

  • A change in the display driver channel order now outputs RGBA instead of ARGB
  • The default (current) coordinate space is different. We now render in world space. Previously this was all in camera space. This affects features like the P AOV
  • RenderMan can now use more than 64 logical cores on Windows
  • Many shading operations are now in object space (displacement is particularly affected and will likely require lookdev or shader changes)
  • Any string that is passed to the renderer must be a "UString" or "unique string". Refer to the RtUString Class in the Developer's Doxygen Guide
  • Curves with normals are supported, as are round curves. But curves with no normals as a notation for desiring always camera-facing curves is not supported. as such, orientation and reverse orientation for curves is no longer supported
  • For subdivision surfaces, face edits higher than depth 1 are not supported
  • dPdTime and dPdCameraTime have changed
  • All functions in librx have been removed, including RxGetContext
  • RixTransform API is deprecated and will be removed soon.
  • Added circular bucket/tile order
  • A new InvalidateTexture call has been added to RixRiCtl.
  • A new mechanism has been added to RixRiCtl to cancel a render
  • Default cache limits have been increased to better reflect modern machines
    • Texturememory and Geocachememory limits are now 4194304
    • Ptexturememory limit is now 32768
    • Opacitycachememory is 2097152

Known Rendering Differences

Known Limitations

Interactive/Live Rendering Limitations

RenderMan Pro Server