Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 25, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Clear the Stage for Round 22.0!
And once again there are updates from the house of Pixar. The well-known renderer RenderMan comes with several new features and also, as usual, more mundane improvements. Worth mentioning here are the Preset Browser Upgrade, the new Curve Representation and Live Rendering…
Live Rendering with RenderMan 22.0
Artists can look forward to a new workflow. Version 22.0 allows continuous rendering while modelling, animating, texturing or whatever else is still being done at the same time. Previously, you might have had to start a render again to see the new result with the changes made. This is no longer necessary.
Although probably the case with every update, there are also some performance improvements here, which RenderMan owes to a new architecture and new curve description. We are now simply going to shamelessly steal the Performance Breakdown from Pixar’s homepage to enjoy a few figures showing how well RenderMan has developed. This compares version 21.5 with 22.0.
- Faster Overall – 10% to 2x
- Memory Reduction – 10% to 30%
- Time to First Pixel – From 20% to 10X
- New Ray Tracing Core – Pure tracing 3X
- Light Discovery – Large numbers of lights render 20% faster
- Curve Rewrite – From 2x to 6x faster & less memory
- Particle Improvements – 2X faster & 30% less memory
- Better Sampling – Convergence looks better, earlier
You can read exactly what has changed with RenderMan 22.0 and what else is new HERE in the release notes.
