Release date: December 21, 2021

Welcome to RenderMan for Blender 24.3!

RenderMan for Blender 24.3 brings some new functionality to artists, as well as several bug fixes. 

Blender Builds Supported

Blender 3.0 is not officially supported. However, in our testing, we have not seen any major breaking issues that would prevent using 3.0, when using RenderMan 24.3.

What's New:

• A cone shape will now be drawn in the viewport to represent the cone angle for lights that support the Cone Angle parameter, emulating behavior that is present in the other RenderMan DCC integrations. Light support this include PxrRectLight, PxrDiskLight, PxrSphereLight, and PxrCylinderLight. Two new properties, Cone Angle Depth and Cone Angle Opacity, controls the depth and opacity of the cone draw in the viewport.

• Add a Reset entry in the viewport integrators menu. Selecting Reset will reset back to the scene integrator

• Added a pref to turn off the use of the <blend_dir> token to reference relative paths

Changes:

• Rendering in the viewport with RIS should be slightly faster. 

• The UI for arrays has changed. The addon will try to update any older scenes to use the new arrays, but it is not guaranteed to work in all conditions, and may require rebuilding/reconnecting of the shader network.

• The addon will now warn if the minor version of RenderMan selected is not compatible.

• When rendering hair, the mesh vertex colors will be added to the hair as primitive variable "Cs".

• You can now choose a separate UV map and vertex colors for hair other than the current active one.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where importing SVGs as curves did not render correctly.

• Fixed a bug where bump and presence were not connectable on PxrSurface

• Fixed the enable parameter labels on PxrLayer

• Fixed a bug that caused light linking of LightFilters to not work

• Fixed an issue where the <udim> token was not working properly

• Fixed an issue where inputAOV on PxrDisneyBsdf was not connectable

• Fixed an issue where utilityInteger on LamaSurface was not connectable

• Fixed an issue where the bump2roughness settings in the texture manager would reset after changes were applied.