New Features

RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 is a major release and an important milestone for Pixar's core rendering technology. Important innovations, enhancements, and performance gains include:

Performance

Speed and efficiency are the central tenets of RPS 17. Ray-traced hair and fur can be potentially 5 times faster. The new implementation of arrays in RSL provides shading speedups of 20% on average. Further speedups can be found in volume rendering and the introduction of adaptive sampling for area shadows. Photon-guided indirect diffuse illumination provides higher-quality results with fewer rays. Memory consumption has been reduced via the new implementation of object instancing, better dicing for curves, and shading optimizations in volumes.

Object Instancing

The new implementation of Object Instancing provides vastly improved rendering performance and memory savings for heavy geometry that is instanced/repeated in your scenes, particularly when ray tracing.

New Photon Mapping Features

Multi-threaded photon tracing, with support for single-pass photon map generation, transient (in-memory) photon maps, photon-guided indirect diffuse illumination, and a new shader method for generating photons from any light source.

Faster Ray-traced Hair with Improved RiCurves

The implementation of the curve primitive has been rewritten to provide faster and more efficient ray tracing performance - performance gains of 32% are typical, but can approach as much as 500% for ray-traced hair and fur, while using 25% to 55% less memory.

Adaptive Area Shadows

PRMan can now adaptively sample shadows (using fewer samples in regions of low variance) for faster area shadows, both ray-traced and not.

RSL Arrays

An overhaul of arrays in the RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) provides significant speedups and efficiencies. Users can expect to see performance increase by 20%, on average.

Volume Rendering Optimizations

Volume Rendering in RPS 17 has been improved in several key areas: volumes that are close to the camera render faster, “visible point” memory has been reduced, “hit testing” for volumes moving through the camera plane has been optimized, and a new, more efficient dicing metric has been implemented.

Additional Features Include:

• RIB-in-.zip
• OpenEXR Updates
• RiProcedurals2
• New RIX Interfaces
• librix Updates
• stdrsl Library Additions
• Alembic support

More Information?

For a full list of features in RenderMan Pro Server 17.0, please consult the release notes in the documentation. For sales inquiries please write rendermansales@pixar.com.