Archive translation. This article summary was published in October 2021 and reflects the RenderMan 24 roadmap at that time. Features, hardware support and licensing may have changed.
In brief: Members of Pixar’s RenderMan development team discussed the renderer’s roadmap and the engineering priorities that followed RenderMan 24.
David Laur, Pixar’s director of product management, explained why RenderMan had only recently increased its emphasis on GPU rendering. The discussion placed that move in the context of production reliability, feature coverage and the demands of large studio pipelines.
RenderMan product manager Mark Manca also addressed the substantial memory requirements of a modern Pixar production and the ways the renderer handled those workloads.
In addition, RenderMan vice president Oliver Meiseberg discussed machine learning and denoising. These technologies were becoming increasingly important to rendering performance and image quality, particularly alongside the developing XPU architecture.
Archive context: Digital Production’s earlier reports cover the RenderMan 24 release and a second RenderMan 24 update. Verify current capabilities through Pixar’s official RenderMan documentation before production use.
