This release introduces improvements to the previous RenderMan. A new method for temporal blur of volumes is included and can improve performance in fantastic ways on some scenes. More savings can be found in using meshlights when it comes to memory consumption and convergence.
Please dive right into the release notes below for more detailed information on the latest version of your favorite renderer!
Fixed a threading bug that would cause a crash when many alembic archives were rendered together
Previously, the PxrSurface bxdf's user AOVs would be black when all its lobe gains are 0. This is no longer the case
Fixed several bugs where the adaptive sampler may interact poorly with checkpointing and not recover all of its state. Validation is now more thorough when warning if any channels driving the adaptive sampler are not going to be included in any checkpoint images
Mesh lights and emissive volumes are now importance sampled according to relative power over the surface/volume. For volumes in particular this can greatly
improve the convergence
The memory consumption of volumetric meshlights has been substantially reduced, by at least 2X and up to 30X or more depending on the data
Points and curves cannot be used as geometric lights.