html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Originally posted on 9 April 2024, and updated with details of RenderMan 26.3.Pixar has released RenderMan 26, the latest major update to its production renderer for visual effects and animation work.RenderMan 26.0 extends RenderMan XPU, the softwares GPU/CPU render engine, adding support for light linking, new light and camera properties, and adaptive sampling.In addition, the AI denoiser can now be used interactively in Blender and Katana, Stylized Looks has been updated, and the software now supports VFX Reference Platform 2023.The integration plugins for Blender, Houdini, Katana and Maya have all also been updated.https://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/240408_RenderMan26_AdaptiveSampling.mp4Support for adaptive sampling improves performance of RenderMan XPU.RenderMan XPU: support for light linking, more camera properties, and adaptive samplingUnlike Pixars recent major releases, RenderMan 26 doesnt add any entirely new toolsets, but it does extend several of the key features from those releases.The most significant changes are to RenderMan XPU, the hybrid GPU/CPU renderer added in RenderMan 24, which now supports a much wider range of lighting and camera features.That includes all of RenderMans analytic light types, light filters, and shadow and light linking; plus camera shutter controls, and tilt shift, lens aberration, and split diopter properties.You can see a list of the remaining features not supported in XPU here, including mesh lights, the Lama layered material system, and some less standard geometry types.Performance has also been improved, with support for adaptive sampling speeding up renders.In addition, Pixar says that interactivity in scenes with many lights is now significantly better, making XPU better suited to shot layout as well as key lighting.Progressive Pixels, XPUs interactive refinement mode, now supports fractional iterations, making it possible to tune performance still further. https://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/240408_RenderMan26_StylizedLooks.mp4Stylized Looks: new Canvas layer, artistic toon mode and more line rendering controlsThe Stylized Looks non-photorealistic rendering toolset, also introduced in RenderMan 24, gets a workflow-focused update, including a new Canvas layer and better organization of AOVs.The Stylized Control system gets a new artistic toon mode which, unlike the existing toon shading, is not physically based, expanding the range of stylization available.The line rendering system gets new color remapping and filtering controls, the latter making it possible to render smoother lines.https://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/240408_RenderMan26_Denoising.mp4AI denoiser: support for interactive denoising in Blender and KatanaIn addition, the AI-trained denoiser introduced in RenderMan 25 for RIS, RenderMans CPU-based final-quality render engine, is now available interactively in Blender and Katana.Support for interactive denoising in Maya and Houdini will follow in future releases.Pixar describes the interactive denoiser as capable of removing noise on images with very low average sample counts and as being predictive of the output of the full offline denoiser.Performance improvements, render statistics and pipeline integrationUnder the hood, performance of both RIS and XPU has been improved, particularly when working on scenes with many instances, and when reading in textures, particularly EXR textures.RenderMans statistics system has also been updated, with a new standalone stats portal application for interacting with the data it generates.For pipeline integration, RenderMan 26 now follows the CY2023 spec for VFX Reference Platform, and support for Python 2 has now been deprecated. Pixar also plans to remove its old deep texture format in the next release in favor of DeepEXR.An image from Toy Story 4, used by Pixar on social media to promote RenderMan 26.3.Updated 26 April 2024: Pixar has released RenderMan 26.1.Its primarily a bugfix update, but it adds support for OpenVDB caching in RIS, speeding up renders of volumetric effects where the same VDB grid is used many times.Updated 24 August 2024: Pixar has released RenderMan 26.2.Again, its primarily a bugfix update, but it does include a new advanced configuration for the denoiser, which lets users read and write to/from multiple files and set up custom passes.The denoiser also automatically supports OpenEXR input files with data windows and single channels.OpenEXR exports now include metadata indicating which variant of RenderMan was used to render the image.For Linux users, the update introduces new EL9 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux) builds of the software, alongside the existing RHEL7 builds.Updated 19 December 2024: Pixar has released RenderMan 26.3.Its another bugfix update, but there are workflow improvements to denoising, including the option to denoise images in tiles, reducing memory usage on large images.The update also adds support for the current versions of host DCC applications, including Maya 2025, Katana 8.0 and the latest production build of Houdini 20.5.Price and system requirementsRenderMan 26.3 is available for Windows 10+, RHEL7/EL9 Linux and macOS 12.0+. The plugins are compatible with Blender 3.0+, Houdini 19.5+, Katana 5.0+ and Maya 2022+.RenderMan XPU is supported on Windows and Linux. It requires a NVIDIA Pascal GPU or newer.New node-locked or floating licences cost $595. There is also a free non-commercial edition of RenderMan, which has also been updated to version 26.3.Read a full list of new features in RenderMan 26 in the online release notesRead an overview of the new features in RenderMan 26 on the product websiteHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.