What's New

RenderMan version 23 delivers significant improvements to production pipelines with robust USD support and new features for look development workflows

Release Notes

Pixar's

Supercharge your studio pipeline with faster, and better methods of processing scene data and interchanging assets between applications.

Pixar Technology

In production environments using multiple applications (such as Maya, Katana, and Houdini), USD can enable a new level of reliable, efficient, flexible collaboration, including sharing of animated geometry, materials, and lights. With USD support planned or released from vendors like SideFX, Autodesk, Foundry, and Nvidia, this new technology will play an increasingly important role in production pipelines, and RenderMan’s support for USD is a critical part of future studio roadmaps across the industry.

Check out how we use it at our Studio:

Pixar's USD Pipeline

Live Rendering

Artist workflows are improved thanks to new interactive editing of resolution and secondary passes.

Interactivity Evolved

RenderMan 23 extends support for interactive “always on” rendering at more stages of the pipeline, improving on the groundwork set by version 22. New and enhanced interactive rendering features allow artists to make better choices without restarting renders, improving productivity in all stages of the pipeline, throughout modeling, grooming, layout, animation, shading, lighting, and into pro-level controls on cameras, frame resolutions, LPEs, and more.

"We have completely rebuilt and modernized our entire production pipeline with RenderMan, Houdini, and USD"

- Andrew Beddini, Technical Supervisor - Image Pipeline, Blue Sky Studios

Houdini 18

Best-in-class support for the Solaris USD look development toolset for Houdini 18.

Learn More >

Sampling Improvements

New statistical adaptive sampling metrics take the guessing game out of convergence by making it more predictable with higher quality.

Interactive Refinement

Tune your first pixel response and make creative choices faster.

More Features

Light Baking – Bake your lighting to 2D texture maps or Point Clouds.
USD Hydra Rendering – Render directly to Hydra via hdPrman.
OpenVDB Updated - New support for OpenVDB 5.2.
VFX Reference Platform 2018 - All plugins are now updated to the new standard, including gcc6.3 and C++14.
Shading Call Access – Path Traced SSS is now available via the Rix interfaces, so that anyone writing their own BxDF can call it.
Artist Tools – Version 23 adds more artist-focused workflow improvements in RenderMan plugins for Autodesk Maya, Foundry Katana, and Sidefx Houdini - further extending the major upgrades to these tools in version 22.
Stability and Power – Under the covers, the version 23 has been focused on improvements to RenderMan core technology, compiler platforms, and extensions to components that affect user experience and APIs that external developers use to provide rich custom integrations.
For more see the Release Notes

What's New?

Cutting-Edge Pipeline Tools, Better Interactivity,

and Look-Dev Improvements