Renderman Studio 近日發佈了功能更加強大的 RenderMan Studio 22，更有助於製作逼真CG圖形圖像，同時，也為眾多藝術 家提供了便捷的線性工作流程。所以，RenderMan Studio 比之前更加強大易用。RenderMan Studio 21將更好地匹配 RenderMan Pro Server。
RenderMan Studio 是 Pixar的一套針對Maya用戶的材質和燈光工具，其中包括如下要素：
- 對 Maya的貢獻 - RenderMan強大功能適用於Maya工作流
- Slim - 強大的視覺材質球編寫處理
- “it” - 圖像流覽器、可編寫腳本的合成器
- Pixar's RenderMan - 具有最新技術的嵌入式渲染器
- LocalQueue - 局部渲染管理
- Tractor - 渲染場的管理解決方案
路徑跟蹤加速渲染
RenderMan Studio現在支援路徑跟蹤加速渲染。新的材質和燈光工作流。RenderMan Studio優化燈光場景，流程更快更直觀。
幾何區域燈光
RMS 18支援任何原始幾何圖形轉換成體積區域光源。這些不但高度逼真，而且可以創建大量複雜燈光特效，幾何區域光為燈光師提供了叫做unified sampling"的屬性，更便於操作。與常規區域燈光相比，它們更簡單快捷。
RenderMan Studio現在具有RFM和Slim的體積區域光。支援功能如下：
- 所有燈光類型： Distant, Spot, Rectangular, Disk, Sphere, Cylinder
- 放射幾何體: 現在幾何體的任意區域都可以用作區域光
- 體積區域光遮擋
- 更便捷的燈光設置、渲染加速
主光面板
主光面板是一種新的燈光面板，它用於控制場景燈光，易於操作。並且，它對重新渲染非常實用。這個主光面板可以同時調節多個燈光，同時，也可以通過創建標籤來保存燈光設置。並且，對於每一個單獨燈光的調節都可以快速預覽效果。
為協助合成工作流程，AOVs現在可以針對單獨燈光輸出。這個新功能同時也支援燈光組，它的出現進一步完善RenderMan Studio燈光系統。
優化的次表面散射
創建逼真人體皮膚一直是一大難題，後期結果取決於次表面散射運算。RPS通過提供次表面散射光束效果，可以更好地創建逼真人體皮膚。這只比常規SSS 稍微繁瑣。但它為我們提供更令人滿意的效果，並且在做動畫時更加穩定。這樣，我們創建的人物角色就更加真實，而不是類似於石蠟效果了。
在RFM和Slim中的材質球圖庫支援改進的光束次表面漫反射技術，這有助於創建更好的人體皮膚以及其他特效。
物體替代
新的RenderMan Studio通過常規Maya物體替代工作流程支援物體替代，這大大提高渲染大的光線跟蹤場景的效率。
改進的體積功能
優化的Renderman體積處理功能。由於場景中接近攝像機的區域採樣不像場景中其他元素一樣多量採樣。無論場景需要多大的體積感，無論你什麼時候需要攝像機和爆炸以及龍捲風互相協作，所需的效果都能夠實現。
優化的Ploygon
完善了的幾何體mesh，大大降低了記憶體要求。基於場景，渲染複雜的幾何體mesh時，用戶可以減小所占記憶體。新功能在置換貼圖情況下，速度比之前提升2-3倍，在沒有置換貼圖情況下，速度比之前提升20%-35%。
其他功能
- 幾何體mesh記憶體大大提升
- 新的海洋材質
- 用於合成時捕捉陰影的HoldOut材質球屬性
- 改進的圖像處理工具“it”，速度更快，功能更加強大
- 新的材質球功能，可以將一個單獨材質用於多個材質的上一層。
RenderMan Pro Server 不只快而且比以往更加真實。不但可以處理多種幾何形狀、更高效、更逼真的燈光和陰影，產生更卓越的成品，適合全世界的3D藝術工作者簡化工作流程是一款最棒的工具。
Faster Re-Rendering
Providing the fastest feedback possible for shaders and lighters is a key goal for RenderMan, so RPS 18 delivers Path Tracing for greatly enhanced interactive re-rendering, allowing lighters and shaders to focus on the artistry of their craft, and to hopefully get home by suppertime.
Neon created with Geometric Area Lights
Better Area Lights
RPS 18 allows you to turn any geometric primitive into a light source with Geometric Area Lights. These lights are not only highly realistic and capable of creating incredibly complicated lighting effects, but geometric area lights are much easier for lighters to control with a feature called "balanced sampling" ... and compared to standard area lights, they're simply faster.
Enhanced Volumes
RenderMan's ability to process volumes has been optimized with hybrid sampling techniques. Because volumes near the camera don't need to be sampled as much as other elements in the scene, the REYES hider has been leveraged to deliver outstanding speed-ups whenever you need to fly a camera through a few explosions, a tornado, or whatever volumetric hijinks a shot demands.
Better Subsurface Scattering
Creating realistic human skin is hard, and the quality of the final result really depends how the subsurface scattering is being calculated. With RPS 18 there's a better way to create realistic skin with Beam Diffusion Subsurface Scattering. This new model is only slightly more expensive than standard SSS, but it produces much more satisfying results (results similar to "quantized diffusion," but that are numerically stable for animation). Now your humans can look real, and not waxy.
And Much More ...
With other significant improvements like Correlated Multi-Jittered Sampling and core optimizations to geometric primitives, RenderMan Pro Server 18 delivers amazing tools for VFX and animation. For the complete feature set please check out the RenderMan Pro Server 18 Release Notes.
More Efficient Polygons
Polygonal meshes have been overhauled, reducing memory requirements significantly. Depending on the scene, users can expect anywhere from a 4x to 10x overall memory reduction when rendering complex polygonal meshes. The new implementation ray traces complex polygonal meshes up to 2 to 3 times faster with displacement and 20% to 35% faster when there is no displacement.
Additional features include:
- Correlated Multi-Jittered Sampling
- New textureatlas() shadeop
- Higher performance for instanced geometry
- Improved statistics
Tractor 是一個網路工作分配制度，用來取代Alfred, which is now de-coupled from RenderMan Studio。
Tractor 提供了許多 Alfred具備的功能，但更加強大和可擴展性。
他並不侷限於只渲染 RenderMan，Tractor可以輕鬆地被用來從各種來源分配網路任務，成為一個中央生產工作分配系統。
Components
Tractor contains 3 key components:
- Tractor Engine
- Tractor Blade
- Tractor Dashboard
Tractor Engine
The engine is the core component of Tractor. It manages the task assignments across the network and keeps a log/database of the spooled jobs. Only one Tractor Engine is usually running on your network, and jobs can be spooled to it via python. There is a sub process of the Engine, called the Monitor. The Monitor handles the requests, generally from clients, to the web interface (Dashboard)
Tractor Blade
The blade is the remote execution server. It is a python based server which asks for tasks and jobs to be handed to it by the Tractor Engine. Unlike the previous alfred/maitre-d configuration, the blades themselves monitor their host's RAM, disk & CPU usage to check if it should be assigned tasks. If the host is heavily loaded with other tasks, then it will not participate in job acceptance. When a Blade asks for work from the Engine, the Engine matches the blade against a set of profiles and assigns it jobs if it matches the criteria in the profiles.
Tractor Dashboard
The Dashboard is the central web interface for your Tractor renderfarm. It lists all the jobs, blades and history of your current setup. Users can customize their own views, including window panes and other properties. This is also where control over existing spooled jobs can be achieved as well as viewing the status of remote execution blades. For more information, see the Tractor User Interace documentation.
Tractor Architecture
Tractor Spooling
Rendering to Tractor from within RenderMan Studio is extremely simple. There is a new switch on the render options, which you can toggle between Alfred and Tractor
Just like Alfred, the Spooling and submitting of jobs is painless. You can select the standard set of rendering methods (local or remote execution, min/max slots etc) just as you could with Alfred.
The jobs are automatically spooled via a script on the tractor engine called tractor-spool.py In actual fact, RenderMan Studio, will create an Alfred file for your job when you do an external render, and it passes this .alf file as a source file for the tractor-spool script.
System Requirements
Hardware
RenderMan now requires CPUs capable of running the full AVX instruction set or better. A minimum of 4GB of RAM is required. For rendering large scenes with many textures, you will need more RAM.
RenderMan XPU™ supports GPU acceleration on 64-bit Linux and Windows systems. GPU acceleration is supported on NVIDIA graphics cards from the Quadro, Tesla or Data Center GPU ranges, with the Maxwell architecture or later. A minimum of 11 GB of VRAM is recommended and 24 GB of VRAM is suggested for best performance. A minimum of 16GB of system RAM is recommended for hybrid (CPU + GPU) processing. For more information on driver requirements, please consult the XPU Technical Specifications.
For utilizing the NVIDIA Optix A.I. Denoiser in "it", Optix 7 supported hardware, NVIDIA Maxwell and newer is required.
Operating System
Linux: Compatible with CentOS/RHEL 7.2
Windows: Compatible with Windows 10
Apple OSX: Compatible with 10.13, 10.14 and 10.15
Please visit the installation pages for your bridge product to ensure you have the correct setup before running RenderMan. Note some, like Houdini and Katana, may require manual configuration of environment files.
Bridge Products
Maya: Compatible with 2019+
Katana: Compatible with 3.2+
Houdini: Compatible with 18.5, 18.0, and 17.5 production versions. See the Installation of RenderMan for Houdini page for the specific list of production builds.
Blender: 2.83 LTS
Building Plugins and Tools
Plugins for RenderMan: Custom RenderMan plugins now require C++14 in order to be compiled and must be compiled with gcc 6.3.1 / Visual Studio 2015 / Xcode 10