RenderMan®

World’s Most Versatile Renderer

RenderMan® is Pixar’s Academy Award®-winning rendering technology, excelling at producing stunning imagery for VFX and feature film animation. RenderMan is constantly evolving to meet new creative and technical challenges and to take advantage of the latest advances in computer technology.

With a new state-of-the-art framework optimized for physically-based rendering, RenderMan can deliver unmatched flexibility for any production pipeline.

Overview

Cutting-Edge Tools
RenderMan delivers out-of-box production tools straight from Pixar and ILM, including materials and light transport…no development required.
Production Denoising
RenderMan ships with a state-of-the-art Denoiser, which uses machine learning and is trained with Pixar datasets, significantly reducing render times.
Built for Collaboration
RenderMan ships with the latest open source tools and comprehensive APIs so you can develop complex collaborative environments, for maximum pipeline flexibility
Digital Humans
RenderMan ships with MaterialX Lama, a new layered material system developed by Industrial Light & Magic to meet the needs of the most demanding visual effects.
Resource Agnostic
With RenderMan XPU™ artists can greatly speed up their look development workflows by harnessing the power of their GPU and can expect perceptually identical results when rendering final frames.
Volumes & Particles
Smoke, fire, clouds, dust, OpenVDB… RenderMan can render it better and faster than ever with XPU support.
Checkpointing
RenderMan has the ability to resume interrupted renders, redefining the animation approval process.
Advanced Hair Shading
RenderMan ships cutting-edge hair and fur materials developed at Pixar Animation Studios.
Secondary Passes
RenderMan AOV and LPE passes can be edited interactively, providing artist friendly and robust workflows for compositing.
Integrators
RenderMan has a unique way of dealing with light transport, by giving artists and developers creative control over camera rays.

What’s NeW

RenderMan^® version 25 delivers a state-of-the-art denoiser and XPU advancements for feature film animation and VFX

Denoiser
The RenderMan Denoiser is a completely new denoising technology developed by Disney Research using state-of-the-art machine learning.
Game Changer
The denoiser is capable of removing noise on images with significantly lower average sample counts and excels with animation and motion blur.
XPU Advancements
Pixar’s next generation rendering engine receives significant updates to interactivity and exciting new features such as volume support.
XPU, Better and Faster!
XPU convergence and interactivity have been greatly improved, marking another great step towards full production rendering.
XPU Outputs
Full support for LPEs and arbitrary AOVs gives artists the control they need to produce high-quality output for compositing and a variety of production scenarios.
Improved Stylization
The Stylized Looks toolset offers more creative controls for artists to create non-photorealistic images.
Updates include improved Toon shading, hatching, line distortion, and UX.

More Features
Progressive Pixels – Fractional first iteration display for improved image feedback with XPU, especially with very heavy models or volumes.
New Texture Cache – Improved performance on GPUs if the texture cache needs to do out-of-core texture lookups or is memory constrained.
Camera Controls – XPU now supports many controls of Pixar Camera, including depth of field and lens aberration.
USD Improvements – Houdini Solaris support has been improved with advancements in MaterialX, camera controls, motion blur, and more.
New Patterns – Extend your look development with new color and bump nodes.
Better Convergence – XPU support for Russian Roulette, Ray Depth, and more.
Bridge Updates – Houdini 19.5 and Katana 6 are now supported.
Deformation Motion Blur – XPU now supports full deformation motion blur, enabling studios to use XPU to generate fast quality control renders.
MaterialX Lama Improvements – ILM’s material layering system gets a new iridescence material response and improved physical accuracy.
Preset Browser – Native QT support in Blender.
New Presets – New collections for fur, hair, stylization, diverse skin, and more.
Light Baking – Improved global illumination baking by up to 2x, as well as additional controls for controlling resolution.
VFX Reference Platform – Updated to the 2021 standard.