State of the Art

RenderMan version 24 is a landmark release with innovation in look-development and industry collaborations, making it the most flexible, powerful, and reliable rendering engine for cinematic imagery.

The RIS technology in RenderMan has matured and evolved into a highly-optimized framework for production needs and RenderMan 24 expands this toolset even further with new Stylized Looks for non-photorealistic renders, a new layered material system developed at Industrial Light & Magic, and an all new live statistics system.

With the launch of Pixar’s hybrid CPU + GPU renderer, RenderMan XPU™, artists can look-develop faster than ever, giving pipelines a suite of exceptional tools for advancing look-development workflows for feature film animation and VFX.

Artistic

RenderMan provides major upgrades to Look Development, with many tools that improve artist workflows and complement the creative process, including the highly anticipated RenderMan XPU™.

Today there are many options for integrating RenderMan into VFX pipelines, including solutions from Pixar for Autodesk Maya, The Foundry KATANA, SideFX Houdini/Solaris, and an all new plugin for Blender. For lighting and look development, RenderMan offers a state-of-the-art system for interactive rendering that is capable of dramatically increasing the throughput of production scenes while allowing artists to focus on their art.

This intuitive system for creating photoreal and stylized looks, allows artists to create the most versatile and unique imagery conceivable.

Uni-Directional Path Tracer

The most used integrator, ideal for outdoor lighting and large direct light sources, this industry standard unidirectional path tracer combines samples from materials at hit points with light samples to estimate direct lighting, then spawns additional rays to handle indirect lighting.

The path tracer ships with source code for further customization.

Bi-Directional Path Tracer

For scenes problematic for unidirectional path tracing, the bi-directional Path Tracer, also called VCM integrator, can save the day. In addition to tracing paths from the camera, bi-directional path tracing also sends rays from light sources and then connects them. VCM can resolve complicated indirect paths and caustic effects that may be prohibitively slow to converge with unidirectional path tracing. Ideal for rendering interiors.

Pixar Unified

Pixar Unified offers both unidirectional and bidirectional path tracing which can be controlled on a per-light basis, so you get the best of both. It also delivers state-of-the-art light path guiding based on work from Disney Research for computer learning. The Pixar Unified integrator also contains functionality for quickly resolving caustic paths, a technique called Manifold Next Event Estimation, allowing caustic paths to resolve much quicker.