Featuring advancements in interactivity and industry collaborations
Today Pixar released RenderMan version 22.5, introducing a completely rewritten RenderMan for Houdini plugin along with significant new features and performance enhancements.
Key Highlights
- RenderMan for Houdini Rewrite
- Adaptive Sampling Fixes (up to 10% to 15% faster)
- Interactive displacement
- Interactive volume density
- Collaboration with Intel to accelerate OSL
RenderMan For Houdini: A New Era of Integration
Pixar’s brand new RenderMan for Houdini plugin has been completely rewritten to support the latest interactive workflows in RenderMan 22. RenderMan’s greatly improved Houdini integration now offers interactive modeling, shading, and lighting capabilities, streamlining the creative process.
RFH Highlights
- Full support for geometry: curves, points, volumes, meshes, and packed primitives.
- Interactive placement and deformation of geometry
- Interactive editing of lights and cameras
- Interactive manipulation of light filters
- Support for Material Builder shader networks using RenderMan’s shading nodes
- Interactive Render Region support
- Support for rendering to Houdini’s native mplay framebuffer and renderview
- Texture Manager – Automatic texture conversion to Pixar’s texture format.
- Preset Browser – Collaborate with Maya and Katana by importing and exporting shaders, light rigs, and HDRI maps
Specifications
- Available starting with RenderMan 22.5
- Plugin is available for download from Pixar on supported Mac, Linux, and Windows OS
- Compatible support for Houdini 17.5.173, 17.0.506, and 16.5.634
- *Houdini Indie support to be available with an upcoming future 17.5.229 release
Pixar’s USD: The Future of Scene Description
Universal Scene Description (USD) is Pixar’s open source file format & API for describing CG scenes & data in a ‘composed’ manner to facilitate concurrent workflows across multiple applications & artists.
RenderMan USD Support – Near Term (June):
Starting with USD 19.07 (a June release), the RenderMan Hydra Delegate will work with RenderMan 22.5. It will be a part of the github source code so anyone will be able to compile it + use it wherever they are using Hydra. This includes usdView, but in reality will be any tool built on top of Hydra. Development is ongoing with ILM and MPC.
RenderMan USD Support – Long Term (Targeting late 2019):
- The ability to load USD archives in RenderMan similar to traditional RIB Archives.
- Supporting rendering USD directly with RenderMan, i.e. with the command “prman myfile.usd”.
Intel SIMD Developments: Boosting Performance with Hardware Acceleration
Pixar and Intel have 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, offering a significant performance boost.
Senior developers at Intel, Pixar, and Sony Pictures Imageworks collaborated on this project. The new OSL implementation in RenderMan 22.5 includes parallel execution of the entire shading network on Intel’s SIMD hardware. It dynamically schedules concurrent operations on 8 or 16 data points in a single CPU instruction depending on available capabilities. These capabilities are available in RenderMan today, and the source code is available upon request while the collaborators work to contribute it to the open source OSL project.
Pixar has seen substantial improvements, with up to 2x faster full renders and quicker time to first pixel on production assets. Average speedups of 15% were measured on a variety of real scenes using Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel® AVX-512 and AVX2).
