Interactive ‘live rendering’ highlights latest update, which is free for all education, research, personal projects and evaluations.
Pixar Animation Studios has announced the release of a major update to Non-Commercial RenderMan, version 22, allowing users to try out the "live rendering," which greatly expands the power of interactive rendering in all stages of the pipeline, from modeling, layout, to final lighting.
The new version delivers a redesigned core for interactive rendering of shaders, lights, and geometry, as well as new studio tools which provide cutting-edge pipeline groundwork. An architecture redesign and new curve description has greatly enhanced the program’s performance, with speed gains up to 2X overall and 6X for curves.
New features include:
- All New Curve Representation – New curve rendering techniques designed around ray tracing large amounts of curves while grooming without needing to re-render to see changes. Now you can comb, style, and dye without having to wait
- All New Raytracing Core – The impressive advancements in interactive workflows are possible through a complete rewrite of the scene graph, along with an extensive cleanup and reduction of the code base by 30%
- True Opacity – First class opacity for motion graphics and scientific visualization without the noise
- OpenVDB Updated - Pixar Volume provides more options to enhance performance as well as new support for OpenVDB 4
- New UX - New user-friendly GUI for improved artist experience
- Progressive Multi-Jittered Sampling – Major improvements in sampling placement for improving convergence in traditionally undersampled areas
- Arbitrary Variables via Tokens – Add arbitrary variables and call them up in Maya's interface to facilitate project management
- OSL and SeExpr – Edit SeExpr & OSL in scene with syntax highlighting
- Comprehensive Python API – Develop custom hooks for RenderMan
- Easy Installation – Self-configuring installation with multi-version support.
Non-Commercial RenderMan is free for all non-commercial purposes, including evaluations, education, research, and personal projects, making it great for students, researchers, and anyone who wants to try RenderMan. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation – the only requirement is that creators include the "rendered with RenderMan" logo in their credits.
This release coincides with the dot release of RenderMan 22.1, which includes support for some new features, including NVIDIA's Optix AI Denoiser.
You can find the complete Release Notes here – you can download Non-Commercial RenderMan here.
Source: Pixar Animation Studios
