Pixar releases RenderMan 27.2
A still from Hoppers, Pixar’s new animated feature, rendered using RenderMan. © Disney/Pixar.
Pixar has released RenderMan 27.2, the latest version of its heavyweight production renderer for VFX and animation.
The update adds new nodes to the Stylized Looks toolset, including new options for creating stylized lighting and hatching effects in renders.
Performance of hybrid CPU/GPU render engine RenderMan XPU has also been improved.
A still from Denver Jackson and 9to3Animation’s The Worlds Divide, using Stylized Looks.
New Stylized Looks nodes for creating non-photorealistic effects
RenderMan 27.2 adds new nodes to Stylized Looks, RenderMan’s toolset for generating non-photorealistic looks.
PxrStylizedLightControl can be used to create artistic lighting effects inside a Pattern shader, before standard RenderMan lights are evaluated.
That makes it possible to change the direction of lightings and shadows for stylized effects like toon shading or hatching independently of the scene lights.
PxrStylizedLinesControl is another in-shader node, this time for line generation.
It computes stylized outlines and thin‑line accents using curvature, edge detection through Sobel filtering, or user‑supplied data.
There are also two new nodes for generating hatching effects.
PxrStylizedHatchControl works directly in the shading network, and supports screen‑space and triplanar projections, and eight layers of hatching textures.
PxrStylizedHatchingSampleXPU works across a frame, and also supports screen-space and triplanar projections.
Stability and performance improvements to RenderMan XPU
RenderMan 27.2 also includes a lot of bugfixes, particularly to RenderMan XPU, the hybrid CPU/GPU render engine that became ready for final-frame rendering in RenderMan 27.0.
In particular, it is now possible to render more complex assets with XPU: the update raises the maximum size of user attributes, and raises the number of channels per texture from 8 to 64.
Price and system requirements
RenderMan 27.2 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 27.2 in the online release notes
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