Pixar'S Renderman 22 Non-Commercial Released

Pixar has just released a major update to Non-Commercial RenderMan, allowing users everywhere to try out the “live rendering” in version 22, greatly expanding the power of interactive rendering in all stages of the pipeline, from modeling, layout, to final lighting … and just in time for the new school year. You can download Non-Commercial RenderMan here: https://renderman.pixar.com/intro_logged_in

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 want to try RenderMan. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation, all you need to do is use the “rendered with RenderMan” logo in your credits.

This release coincides with the dot release of 22.1, which includes support for some new features, including NVIDIA’s Optix AI Denoiser. (https://developer.nvidia.com/optix-denoiser)

Pixar’S Renderman 22 Non-Commercial Released

What’s New

RenderMan version 22 is an exciting release that delivers a redesigned core for interactive rendering of shaders, lights, and geometry, as well as new studio tools which provide cutting-edge pipeline groundwork

Performance Improvements

There are speed gains across the board, up to 2X overall speedup and 6X for curves, thanks to an architecture redesign and new curve description.

Performance Breakdown

Numbers are compared using RenderMan 21.5 vs 22.0

Faster Overall — 10% to 2x
Memory Reduction — 10% to 30%
Time to First Pixel — From 20% to 10X
New Ray Tracing Core — Pure tracing 3X
Light Discovery — Large numbers of lights render 25% faster
Curve Rewrite — From 2x to 6x faster & less memory
Particle Improvements — 2X faster & 30% less memory
Better Sampling — Convergence looks better, earlier

More Features

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.