Pixar releases RenderMan 27.1
A still from Elio, Pixar’s recent animated feature, which was rendered using RenderMan. The image was provided as part of the marketing material for RenderMan 27. © Disney/Pixar
Pixar has released RenderMan 27.1, the latest version of the heavyweight production renderer for VFX and animation.
The update extends support for layered material system MaterialX Lama inside XPU, RenderMan’s hybrid CPU/GPU render engine, and updates its new checkpointing system.
The first update following the landmark RenderMan 27 release
RenderMan 27.1 follows only three weeks after RenderMan 27 itself, so not surprisingly, most of the changes are extensions to, or bugfixes for, the new features it introduced.
Described by Pixar as “the most significant release in over a decade”, RenderMan 27 made RenderMan XPU, the software’s hybrid CPU/GPU render engine, ready for final-frame rendering as well as interactive previews.
Key changes in XPU include interactive denoising, deep workflows, support for mattes and holdouts for compositing, extended shading capabilities, and support for multi-GPU rendering.
RenderMan 27.1: better support for MaterialX Lama and checkpointing inside XPU
RenderMan 27.1 extends XPU’s support for layered material system MaterialX Lama.
XPU now supports the coating functionality by which Lama base nodes like LamaDielectric change their absorption behavior when plugged into the top material of a LamaLayer.
XPU’s new checkpointing system has been updated to match the older RIS render architecture, executing the checkpoint command after a successful render, not just after each checkpoint.
In addition, the live statistics overview window available for both RIS and XPU now displays the active pixel count with the iteration count.
Price and system requirements
RenderMan 27.1 is compatible with Windows 10+, macOS 15.x+ and glibc 2.34+ Linux. Integration plugins are available for Blender 3.6+, Houdini 20+, Katana 7+ and Maya 2024+.
RenderMan XPU is supported on Windows and Linux. It requires a NVIDIA Pascal GPU or newer.
New perpetual and node-locked floating licenses cost $845, including 12 months’ maintenance. There is also a free non-commercial edition.
Read a full list of new features in RenderMan 27.1 in the online release notes
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