Tech Specs

Deployed at the most demanding studios, RenderMan and Tractor have the power and reliability to achieve your creative vision

Get RenderMan

Avatar: The Way of Water © 20th Century Studios

Modern Physically-Based Rendering

RenderMan offers a combination of unbiased and biased rendering techniques which provide both accuracy and technical efficiency

State of the Art

RenderMan version 25  delivers many features and updates to improve speed, quality, and scalability. The cornerstone of this release is an advanced Denoiser from Disney Research which uses machine learning to significantly accelerate the rendering process.

Pixar’s state-of-the-art rendering technology, XPU, has also reached major new milestones, including volume rendering, full support for secondary passes, and faster interactivity. Many new core improvements have also been made, including in stylization, MaterialX Lama, light baking, as well as increased integration with Pixar's USD.

Artistic

Today there are many options for integrating RenderMan into VFX pipelines, including solutions from Pixar for Autodesk Maya®, The Foundry KATANA®, SideFX Houdini®/Solaris, as well as Blender®. For lighting and look development, RenderMan offers a state-of-the-art system for interactive rendering that is capable of dramatically increasing the throughput of production scenes while allowing artists to focus on their art.

This intuitive system for creating photoreal and stylized looks, allows artists to create the most versatile and unique imagery conceivable.


Production-Ready Light Transport

Uni-Directional Path Tracer

The most used integrator, ideal for outdoor lighting and large direct light sources, this industry standard unidirectional path tracer combines samples from materials at hit points with light samples to estimate direct lighting, then spawns additional rays to handle indirect lighting.

The path tracer ships with source code for further customization.

Bi-Directional Path Tracer

For scenes problematic for unidirectional path tracing, the bi-directional Path Tracer, also called VCM integrator, can save the day. In addition to tracing paths from the camera, bi-directional path tracing also sends rays from light sources and then connects them. VCM can resolve complicated indirect paths and caustic effects that may be prohibitively slow to converge with unidirectional path tracing. Ideal for rendering interiors.

Pixar Unified

Pixar Unified offers both unidirectional and bidirectional path tracing which can be controlled on a per-light basis, so you get the best of both. It also delivers state-of-the-art light path guiding based on work from Disney Research for computer learning. The Pixar Unified integrator also contains functionality for quickly resolving caustic paths, a technique called Manifold Next Event Estimation, allowing caustic paths to resolve much quicker.

“The AI Denoiser has transformed our studio pipeline allowing shots to be rendered which would otherwise be impossible"

- Steve may, Pixar CTO

Custom Development

RenderMan's robust APIs provide all the necessary tools for studios to write their own integrators and materials, allowing development teams creative and non-destructive freedom to experiment with cutting-edge technology.

The Lion King © Disney.

 

 

Multi-Threaded and GPU Ready



To maximize interactivity, RenderMan has great scalability on machines with many cores and provides fast look-development workflows with XPU™.

Additional Features

  • GPU + CPU hybrid rendering for look development
  • Layerable Materials from Industrial Light & Magic
  • Non-Photorealistic rendering
  • Live statistics and instrumentation
  • Pixar Unified Integrator
  • Unique Unbiased Path Traced Subsurface Scattering
  • Physical and Artistic Hair Shading
  • True Opacity
  • Dispersion
  • Importance, Blue Noise, and Adaptive Sampling
  • OSL Patterns
  • Programmable AOV and LPE passes
  • DeepEXR Data Support
  • Cryptomatte Support
  • Watertight Displacement
  • Interactive Displacement Edits
  • Daylight Simulator
  • Analytic Area Lights
  • Gobos, Blockers, Filters, Portals
  • Emissive Geometry
  • Global Light Sampling
  • Interactive Lighting and Look Development
  • Maya Fluids, OpenVDB
  • Multi-lobe Bump and Normal mapping
  • GGX and Beckman specular
  • Tilt-shift, chromatic aberration, rolling shutter
  • Texture and Light Baking
  • Occlusion integrator and pattern
  • Light temperature
  • IES profiles
  • For more see the Release Notes

 

Out of This World Innovation

Developed specifically for animation and VFX, this release is continuing to raise the bar for look development and industry collaborations.

The Future is Here!

Version 25 delivers dramatic improvements to interactivity with support for volumes, secondary passes, and enhanced performance with the next phase of RenderMan XPU, Pixar’s next generation renderer.

Open Standards

In 1988 RenderMan established an open standard to describe 3D data: the RenderMan Interface Specification (the RISpec). Since then, Pixar has continuously developed RenderMan to push the limits of the core technology while helping to adopt and promote new standards for the creation of high-end visual effects and animation. In today's continued efforts, RenderMan supports many open standards, among them: Alembic, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenSubdiv, OpenVDB, OSL, SeExpr, Ptex, UDIM, USD

Cross Platform

RenderMan and all its plug-ins are made for the three main operating systems: Linux, OSX, and Windows.

RenderMan Components

RenderMan DCC Plugin
The Interface

RenderMan is built specifically for every plugin to take advantage of the application's maximum potential

RenderMan Pro Server
The Engine

RenderMan Pro Server crunches the data generated by your application plugin and renders the image.

Willow © Disney.


Operating System Compatibility

64-bit Linux

Compatible with CentOS/RHEL 7.2 - gcc 9.3.1 and glibc 2.17

64-bit Mac OSX

Compatible with versions 10.14 and 10.15

64-bit Windows

Compatible with Windows 10


DCC Compatibility

Maya

Houdini

Katana

Blender


Hardware Requirements

CPU

RenderMan and XPU require a processor with AVX capabilities.

GPU

RenderMan XPU and the Optix denoiser require an Nvidia graphics card of Maxwell architecture or above. 

Memory

RenderMan needs a minimum of 4GB of RAM and XPU needs a minimum of 11GB of VRAM. Maximum RAM depends on scene complexity.

Plugins

VFX Reference Platform: CY2021. Custom plugins can utilize C++ 17 and must be compiled with gcc 9.3.1

Robust and Modern UX

Derived from years of experience, Tractor is a modern and robust solution for network rendering, capable of scaling up to the largest render farms.

Cross-Platform and Web Based

Tractor is packaged for each operating system, containing all of the Tractor components you will need, though each machine may only use a subset

Tractor Highlights

  • Powerful scripting interfaces
  • Native Maya Integration
  • Flexible resource-sharing controls
  • Python module extensions
  • Minimal computational footprint
  • Streamlined installation
  • Major user interface enhancements
  • Open web standards
  • HTML5 support
  • For more see the Tractor Overview


Tractor System Requirements

Tractor-Engine

Central job queue, installed on one host only Linux 64-bit (gcc4.4), Mac OS X (10.8+)

Tractor-Blade

Task execution server, on render blades Based on Python 2.7, for: Linux-64, Mac OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+.

Tractor-Dashboard

Web-based user interface, job browsing and control. Compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. No platform-specific plug-ins required

Tractor-Spool/Query

Job submission and advanced command line tools, on user workstations based on Python 2.7. Submission API's based on Python 2.7 or Python 3.7+
For: Linux-64, Mac OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+.

NEWS | RenderMan receives IEEE Milestone Award!