EMERYVILLE, CA — Pixar (https://renderman.pixar.com) has released RenderMan Version 22.5, featuring a completely rewritten RenderMan for Houdini plug-in, along with important new features and performance gains.
Some of the new release’s highlights include Adaptive Sampling Fixes (up to 10% to 15% faster), interactive displacement, interactive volume density, and a collaboration with Intel to accelerate OSL.
The new RenderMan for Houdini plug-in has been rewritten to support the latest interactive workflows in RenderMan 22. RenderMan's greatly improved integration with Houdini includes interactive modeling, shading, and lighting. There is now full support for geometry: curves, points, volumes, meshes, and packed primitives. And interactive improvements include placement and deformation of geometry, editing of lights and cameras, and manipulation of light filters. There is now support for Material Builder shader networks using RenderMan’s shading nodes. Interactive Render Region support has been added, and there is support for rendering to Houdini’s native mplay framebuffer and renderview.
The plug-in is available for download from Pixar on supported Mac, Linux, and Windows OS.
Pixar and Intel collaborated to bring hardware acceleration of OSL to RenderMan Version 22.5. RenderMan now provides fully enabled SIMD hardware acceleration of CPU intensive OSL operations. Previous experimental work on this capability has been significantly updated for production use at Pixar and is now enabled by default.