And not only that, the production shaders at Pixar work thousands and thousands of lines long. “For years it was that the scene wouldn’t fit in memory. Memory has traditionally been a gating factor for RenderMan. As such Pixar wants a general-purpose solution and one that addresses the needs of its users. The XPU is not just a GPU version of the CPU, it is an integrated hybrid CPU + GPU rendering engine. And it really does let us do a lot more general-purpose things with the hardware than we ever could before.” The RenderMan team has traditionally been able to innovate much faster on the CPU side of the equation due to just the programming environment. “The general programmability of the GPU has come so far, the general CUDA environment makes all the difference in my opinion. He cites firstly what he characterizes as a change in the programming landscape. Why GPU now?ĭavid Laur, Director of Product Management, believes there are several reasons why only now has RenderMan made the move to release the XPU and embrace the GPU. Physically-based materials aid accurate lighting, especially in combination with the new Color Management support for ACES in look development workflows. Unofficially, a sensible-sized GPU for XPU in production would be a 24gigabtye card.Īrtists and TDs can shade objects in the context of their scenes, get approval, and send to RenderMan RIS for a perceptually identical final frame. Given the memory constraints, one is best to use an NVIDIA card with as much memory as possible. Users must have a Maxwell class card or above and be using a recent driver. Unfortunately, this does not run on Mac OSX, the GPU side of XPU only supports NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux and Windows.
RENDERED WITH RENDERMAN LOGO DOWNLOAD
Until last week XPU was not included in the Non-Commercial RenderMan, but you can currently download a version for the next month that includes a limited duration free evaluation license.
This first phase of XPU is focused on accelerating look development for shading artists. XPU is Pixar’s next-generation hybrid CPU + GPU rendering engine, rewritten for speed and efficiency on film production assets. RenderMan has had many industry-leading best-of-class innovations, but this move to GPU is a major step for the RenderMan team.
RENDERED WITH RENDERMAN LOGO PROFESSIONAL
RenderMan is an Academy Award-winning rendering solution, excelling at producing a stunning range of professional imagery for feature film animation, VFX, and projects. We sat down with the senior RenderMan team to discuss the state of RenderMan’s newest advances and the roadmap looking forward. Version 24 delivers new interactive rendering capability with the first release of RenderMan XPU, as well as new picture-making capabilities with RenderMan’s Stylized Looks. RenderMan version 24 delivers a suite of exceptional tools for advancing look-dev workflows for feature film animation and VFX.
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