Pixar releases RenderMan 26.2 | CG Channel

Originally posted on April 9, 2024 and updated with details about RenderMan 26.2.

Pixar has released RenderMan 26, the latest major update to its production renderer for visual effects and animation.

RenderMan 26.0 extends RenderMan XPU, the software's GPU/CPU rendering engine, adding support for light linking, new light and camera properties, and adaptive sampling.

In addition, the AI ​​Denoiser can now be used interactively in Blender and Katana, Stylized Looks has been updated, and the software now supports the VFX Reference Platform 2023.

The integration plugins for Blender, Houdini, Katana and Maya have also all been updated.

Support for adaptive sampling improves the performance of RenderMan XPU.

RenderMan XPU: Support for light linking, more camera properties and adaptive sampling
Unlike Pixar's recent major releases, RenderMan 26 doesn't add entirely new toolsets, but it does extend some of the core features of those releases.

The most important changes concern RenderMan XPU, the hybrid GPU/CPU renderer added in RenderMan 24, which now supports a much wider range of lighting and camera features.

This includes all of RenderMan's analytical lights, light filters, and shadow and light links, as well as camera shutter controls and tilt-shift, lens aberration, and split diopter properties.

A list of the rest of the features not supported in XPU can be found here, including mesh lights, the Llama layered material system, and some less standard geometry types.

Performance has also been improved: support for adaptive sampling speeds up rendering.

In addition, Pixar says that interactivity in scenes with lots of lights is now significantly better, making XPU better suited for shot layout as well as key lighting.

Progressive Pixels, XPU's interactive refinement mode, now supports fractional iterations, allowing performance to be optimized even further.

Stylized looks: new canvas layer, artistic cartoon mode and more line art controls
The non-photorealistic rendering toolset “Stylized Looks”, also introduced in RenderMan 24, gets a workflow-focused update, including a new canvas layer and better organization of AOVs.

The Stylized Control system receives a new artistic toon mode that, unlike the existing toon shading, is not physically based, thus expanding the range of available stylizations.

The line rendering system gets new controls for color remapping and filtering, which allow for smoother lines.

AI-Denoiser: Support for interactive denoising in Blender and Katana
In addition, the AI-trained denoiser introduced in RenderMan 25 for RIS, RenderMan's CPU-based final-quality render engine, is now available interactively in Blender and Katana.

Support for interactive denoising in Maya and Houdini will follow in future versions.

Pixar describes the interactive noise reducer as being able to remove noise from images with a very low average sample count and “predict” the output of the full offline noise reducer.

Performance improvements, render statistics and pipeline integration
Under the hood, RIS and XPU performance has been improved, especially when working on scenes with many instances and when reading in textures, especially EXR textures.

RenderMan's statistics system has also been updated and features a new standalone statistics portal application for interacting with the data it generates.

For pipeline integration, RenderMan 26 now follows the CY2023 specification for the VFX Reference Platform and support for Python 2 is now deprecated.

Pixar also plans to remove its old deep texture format in favor of DeepEXR in the next version.

A still from the Pixar animated film “Inside Out 2” used to promote RenderMan 26.

Updated on April 26, 2024: Pixar has released RenderMan 26.1.

It is primarily a bug fix update, but it adds support for OpenVDB caching in RIS, speeding up the rendering of volumetric effects that use the same VDB grid multiple times.