Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 9, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Alongside the release of RenderMan 21.5 at SIGGRAPH, Pixar made further announcements. The new 2017 showreel seen here reflects the renderer’s capabilities over the past year – largely with work by ILM and MPC. For future versions of the renderer, Pixar has now announced live rendering and GPU use, among other things – release dates are unknown.
RenderMan 22 Live Render and XPU
The “always-on” rendering mode is intended to allow direct editing of geometry, camera, light and material in RenderMan 22 while using the batch renderer. Other features mentioned include vectorized OSL shader networks and SIMD CPUs scalable on Intel. Pixar also unveiled RenderMan XPU, a combined CPU + GPU solution that is currently in development. XPU technology enables simultaneous CPUs and GPUs use. More precise information is planned after the release of version 22.
You can reach Pixar’s official announcement here.
Availability
RenderMan 21.5 can still be purchased on this page for $ 495 per licenses. Individual users can also download the non-commercial version for free.
