What's New?

RenderMan XPU is ready for the largest VFX and feature animation productions with a landmark release

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Hoppers © Disney/ Pixar

What's New

RenderMan® 27 marks a historic leap forward with XPU production rendering, ushering a new era of GPU accelerated rendering at Pixar Animation Studios.

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Production Ready

RenderMan XPU is ready for final frame rendering, ushering a new era of CPU & GPU rendering at Pixar.

Next-Gen Performance

The XPU architecture has been extensively tested in Pixar productions, and now supports final frame rendering, enabling artists to utilize both CPU and GPU resources for efficient high-quality image production. This fundamental shift enhances rendering interactivity and scalability, making XPU the backbone of future RenderMan development.

Hoppers © Disney/Pixar

MaterialX Lama

RenderMan Version 27 supercharges look-development thanks to early access to Industrial Light & Magic’s shading toolset in XPU

Fantastic Four: First Steps © Disney

 

Robust Compositing



With display and sample filter support, XPU now includes additional compositing capabilities necessary for visual effects, such as mattes, holdouts, and deep data.

Artwork by Pierre Bournigault. Cars © Disney/Pixar

Redesigned Stylization

The Stylized Looks™ toolset has been expanded in XPU, enabling a whole new range of non-photorealistic effects, including new painterly styles.

Developed for Artists by Artists

Thanks to the speed of XPU, the stylization toolset receives major updates to artistic controls and looks, which have been developed in collaboration with DAMN! Vizdev, 9 to 3 Animation and Cloudrise Pictures, to ensure it meets the needs of the most ambitious creatives.

Artwork by DAMN! Vizdev. Inspired by the works of Jesper Ejsing.

 

New Creative Tools in XPU


Upgrade your stylization sandbox with a new set of non-photorealistic controls in XPU such as painterly styles, toon shading, and sketch-like rendering, as well as new in-shading pattern controls for easier artist workflows.

Artwork by Cloudrise Pictures and 9 to 3 Animation. The Worlds Divide © Denver Jackson | Produced by 9to3 Animation

Interactive Denoiser

Now available interactively in XPU and all bridge products, the RenderMan Denoiser uses machine learning to deliver state-of-the-art results

Toy Story 5 © Disney/Pixar

 


Fast and Accurate


The Interactive denoiser is capable of removing noise on images with very low average sample counts and is predictive of the full offline denoiser.

Almost Magic

Thanks to machine learning powered by production data, the AI Denoiser stands out in preserving complex, intricate details that could otherwise be lost, even with very low average samples, making it ideal for demanding applications like feature animation and VFX.

The Denoiser is so accurate, it significantly reduces rendering times while maintaining high fidelity, and has been occasionally called “magic” by industry veterans.

 

Improved Performance


With full support for nested instancing, quicker hair rendering, better texture conversion, more flexible memory allocation, and multi-GPU support, RenderMan XPU is more robust than ever.

Hoppers © Disney/Pixar

“RenderMan 27 empowers artists to create at the speed of their imagination.“

- Richard Kerris, VP of Media and Entertainment, NVIDIA

 

More Features

  • Deep Data – XPU now supports deepEXR workflows, including deepID, allowing for precise compositing of complex volume and transparent elements
  • Multi-GPU – XPU now leverages multiple GPUs simultaneously alongside CPUs, leveraging all rendering resources.
  • Mesh Lights – Geometric light support is now available in XPU, enabling the use of physical light types and greatly improving geometric flexibility over lighting effects.
  • Checkpointing – Output partial frames as checkpoints, increasing production efficiency.
  • Better Statistics – Improved ways to track performance and resource utilization for RenderMan and the Denoiser.
  • Bridge Updates – Support for the latest 3D apps, including Houdini 21, Katana 8, Maya 2026, and the Blender 4.4
  • OSL Trace Capabilities – Use occlusion to create dirt and other raytracing effects with RenderMan patterns.
  • More Look Dev Features – Nested instancing, OSL improvements (trace, getattribute), interior volume aggregates, as well as glass and single scattering enhancements, extends XPU's look development.
  • Advancements in USD – Houdini’s Solaris receives several improvements including UI improvements and deeper pipeline integrations.
  • Better Texture Management – Faster texture conversion with OpenImageIO and native mipmapped EXR support to skip conversion altogether.
  • VFX Reference Platform – Updated to the 2024 standard.


  • For more see the Release Notes








 
 

Non-Commercial RenderMan XPU™

Pixar's next gen renderer is now available with non-commercial RenderMan!

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NEWS | RenderMan 27 is here!