Welcome to RenderMan for Maya 24!
This new release of RenderMan for Maya 24 (RfM), includes a number of new features to address feedback as well as many improvements to RenderMan for Maya workflow and performance. It continues to support the full RenderMan feature set. See the RenderMan Release Notes for more details.
This current release offers support for:
- Maya 2019
- Maya 2020
- Maya 2022
Please see the release notes below for all the new capabilities and known issues.
What's New
RenderMan for Maya has been extended to support all of the features of RenderMan 24, including:
- XPU™ – Switch to XPU for doing Look Development. XPU is Pixar’s hybrid CPU + GPU rendering technology is a next-generation rendering engine, rewritten for speed and efficiency on film production assets. This first phase of XPU is focused on accelerating look development for shading artists. XPU is only available if you have a Commercial license of RenderMan
- MaterialX Lama – Use RenderMan 24's new Layered Materials developed at Industrial Light and Magic. It introduces a modular approach for building materials.
- Stylized Looks™ – Move beyond physically based shading and lighting into a world where you can easily create a variety of styles for your projects. You can non-destructively control outlines, create sketch patterns, and develop a wide range of unique looks. Stylized Looks are only available if you have a Commercial license of RenderMan
- OpenColorIO – Robust support for the industry standard ACES color management system and other color spaces
- Live Statistics – Watch your rendering resource usage live, thanks to a completely redesigned statistics system that prioritizes interactivity and extensibility
OSL Patterns – We have converted the great majority of C++ patterns to OSL. This conversion allows the sharing of code between RIS and XPU, which provides confidence that the renders from RenderMan XPU are representative of what you will see in RenderMan RIS. C++ patterns are still supported, but they will only work in RIS
- And more!
Miscellaneous and Important Bug Fixes and Changes
- Color and float ramp widgets are not enclosed in an extra group anymore, if they share the same label as the enclosing group
- The Pixel Variance fields have a five-digits precision instead of 3
- Nodes created via the "Create render Node" dialog now connect automatically to the requested attribute
- Fixed a bug where LPEs with light groups weren't rendering via mayabatch
- Fixed a bug where only the first xgen instanced archive was output
- LocalQueue log improvements. Syntax highlighting in the log widget. "="/"-" keyboard shortcuts to increase/decrease log font size
- When tokenizing textures, instead of defaulting to _MAPID_, updated the regular expressions to insert <udim>/u<v>_v<v>/u<V>_v<V> instead
- RIB Archive export: When "Omit defaulted attributes" is enabled, RFM will omit the "maxdiffusedepth", "maxspeculardepth" and "relativepixelvariance" attributes in RIB archives, if they are set to their default value, so they may be overridden
- Archive Scene now collects all texture atlases
- Improvements to shader namespacing capabilities if using look file
- Improvements to varying instances within archives
- Alembic cache motion blur improvements
Developer Documentation
You can find a useful Doxygenated developer documentation in the Developers' Guide under RfM2
Known Limitations
Live Statistics
- The initial integration is available, but live statistics are turned off by default. Artists can turn on the statistics through the buttons in the UI.
General
- Deselecting "Receive Shadows" does not work.
- Light Linking volumes is not currently supported
- The Holdout shelf button fails to operate, use the shape node render stat setting Maya to create the holdout object.
- Creating a mesh light from existing geometry during IPR will duplicate the geometry in-render. Restart the render to remove the duplicate.
- We do not support Camera Facing Curves in Xgen
- Xgen will not reflect changes in the Collection
- Maya Fur Feedback is not supported