What's New
RenderMan 21.7 is an exciting release, delivering Cryptomatte support as well as improvements and optimizations for shading, lighting, and volumes.
Path Traced Subsurface Scattering
RenderMan has a cutting-edge path traced subsurface scattering model ideal for digital humans.
Better Skin & Soft Materials
RenderMan 21.5 was the first VFX commercial renderer in the industry to ship with a physically based model for subsurface scattering, a truly accurate model for photorealistic skin based on deep path tracing and albedo controls.
Until now, the implementations available to the VFX industry for these effects have been substantial approximations, which inherently produced errors and artifacts. RenderMan's new subsurface approach significantly increases quality and realism when rendering skin and other soft or delicate materials, which is essential for creating believable characters.
© Telyuka - Hair generated in Shave & Haircut
Cryptomatte
RenderMan now supports the industry standard Cryptomatte allowing advanced ID workflows for compositing.
Developed for Production
Cryptomatte is a tool created at Psyop by Jonah Friedman and Andy Jones. It creates ID mattes automatically with support for motion blur, transparency, and depth of field, using organizational information already available at render time.
Robot Room by Leif Pedersen © Disney/ Pixar
Physical and Artistic Hair
RenderMan has great artistic controls for hair.
More Artistic Hair
New artistic controls allow artists to control subtle nuances and variation in color and sheen, while also providing a more natural response to light with improved energy conservation
Extensive plugin support
RenderMan has seamless Xgen integration with Maya and supports the leading plugins, including Joe Alter's Shave and Haircut and Peregrine Labs' Yeti.
Advanced Patterns
RenderMan continues to expand its suite of advanced production patterns, including new patterns to create easy variations of textures and primvars.
"RIS allows us to focus on aesthetics instead of technology"
-Paul Oakley - Lighting TD Finding Dory
Better Denoising
New optimizations for Intel CPUs, and CUDA acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs.
Finding Dory © Disney/ Pixar
The Easy Button!
Clean up sampling noise 2-4x faster with RenderMan's Denoiser! Developed by Disney for Big Hero 6, the Denoiser has been used on all Pixar films since Finding Dory. It has recently been upgraded with several new features, including full Intel CPU code vectorization. For Zootopia, Disney optimized the Denoiser to handle lots of fur and hair, while at Pixar the Denoiser was extended to support GPU acceleration, reducing the time required to denoise a feature film frame to seconds.
