Archive notice: This article was originally published on 4 December 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Pixar has released RenderMan 23.0, bringing many new features including Houdini USD support, improved interactive rendering and more.
RenderMan 23 Release Highlights
Interactive Rendering
For interactive rendering mode, RenderMan 23.0 offers new functions intended to make the workflow faster. You can now change AOVs, LPEs and the resolution dynamically without having to restart the renderer. To reduce tearing in large scenes, RenderMan also contains a new “Decidither” option. This allows the crop to be updated gradually with a dissolve-like effect.
USD in Houdini Solaris and PDG
The Houdini plug-in adds support for RenderMan (Hydra) in Solaris , the new USD-based look-dev, layout and lighting tool in Houdini 18. Alongside use as a viewport renderer, the plug-in also contains batch-rendering options, interactive display capabilities, expanded settings for light sources in Solaris and more. With the new support for PDG, you can also use Houdini’s pipeline environment for RenderMan, including the TOP nodes Texture Maker, Generate RIB, Render RIB, ROP RenderMan Render and Denoise.
Further Changes
- Adaptive Sampling System with new statistical methods for better determining when sampling of a pixel should stop.
- VFX Reference Platform CY2018 support (C++14, GCC6.3, OpenVDB 5.2, Alembic 1.7.11, Python 3 bindings supporting 3.4 & 3.5).
- Shading Call Access: Path-traced SSS now available through the Rix interface
Availability
RenderMan 23.0 is available for Windows, macOS and Linux here and is currently compatible with Houdini 17.0 and above, as well as Maya 2018.3+ and Katana 3.0+. The renderer currently costs 595 dollars, and a free non-commercial version is already available.
Further information: Release notes
