Blender users will soon get their own official RenderMan plugin, Pixar has announced.
The integration, which will be released alongside RenderMan 24, will support all of the heavyweight VFX and animation renderer’s latest features, including new CPU/GPU rendering system RenderMan XPU.
New official Pixar plugin supersedes previous community-developed tools
Blender has had RenderMan integrations in the past: not least PRMan for Blender, a semi-official add-on developed by a group of Pixar engineers, and released alongside RenderMan 20.
It’s still available on GitHub, but it hasn’t been updated for some time, and doesn’t support the newer features of either RenderMan or Blender itself.
New Modeling Features in Blender 2.9 Extrude Manifold is a new tool for extruding faces inwards while deleting overlapping faces and dissolving overlapping vertices. You can’t use it to punch holes straight through objects yet, but its initial implementation is already very useful. Vertex Slide now supports snapping!!!
Supports all of RenderMan’s latest features, including RIS and RenderMan XPU
The new add-on puts the open-source software on the same footing as the other DCC tools with official Pixar-developed integration plugins: Maya, Houdini, Katana and Mari.
Finalized update to support Blender 2.9+ as well as new features, fixes and more stability. In extension of #2082 👍 5 🎉 5 🚀 4. Blender 2.81 introduced Intel OpenImageDenoise in the compositor, in 2.90 you can use this denoiser interactively in the 3D viewport as well as for final renders. Simply select OpenImageDenoise from the new Denoising panel. 374k members in the blender community. /r/blender is a subreddit devoted to Blender, the amazing open-source software program for 3D modeling Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.
It will support the latest version of Blender – despite the wording on the image above, Pixar says that it will be supporting Blender 2.90 and other 2.9 series releases.
The official RenderMan for Blender plugin will also fully support RenderMan’s current RIS architecture, as well as RenderMan XPU, its upcoming hybrid CPU/GPU rendering system.
Blender artists will also be able to use all of the other new features in version 24, including Stylized Looks, the ILM-developed Lama layered material system, and new OSL pattern nodes.
The plugin will support both viewport rendering and final-quality output.
Availability and system requirements
RenderMan 24 is due for release in “Q1 2021” for Windows 10, CentOS/RHEL 7.x Linux and macOS 10.14+. RenderMan XPU and the RenderMan for Blender plugin will ship with version 24.
The current release, RenderMan 23.4, is is available for 64-bit Windows 8.1+, CentOS/RHEL 7.2 Linux and macOS 10.13+, with integrations for Maya 2018.3+, Houdini 17.0+, Katana 3.0+ and Mari 4.5+.
There is also a free non-commercial edition of RenderMan, which can be used for tools development. New commercial node-locked or floating licences cost $595.
Visit the RenderMan product website
(No extra information about the Blender plugin at time of writing)
Download the free non-commercial version of RenderMan (Registration required)
Related posts:
Blender 2.9 Update
Tags: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.90, download, final quality, free, Houdini, integration, Katana, Lama, Mari, Maya, new features, non-commercial, official, open source, Pixar, plugin, release date, release dates, RenderMan, RenderMan 24, RenderMan for Blender, RenderMan XPU, RIS, Stylized Looks, system requirements, viewport rendering
Blender is very dynamically developed, so new versions of the program appear regularly. However, having downloaded the next release from the Blender website, we always need to configure it in a convenient way.
In order not to manually reset all personal user settings and reinstall all add-ons, we can quickly transfer settings and add-ons from the previous version to the new version of Blender.
- When we start Blender for the first time, in the splash screen we can press the “Load 2.xx Settings” button.
After that, settings and add-ons from the version indicated on the button will be transferred to the current version of Blender.
- Or, if we want to control the process of transferring settings ourselves, we can manually copy files with settings and add-ons.
Open the following directory on your computer:
c:Users_user_name_AppDataRoamingBlender FoundationBlender
Blender 2.9 Release Notes
It will contain a list of directories with the names of the different Blender versions previously installed on your computer.
Make a copy of the folder with the version from which you want to take settings and add-ons and then rename it to the number of the new version of Blender.
When starting, Blender will pick up the settings from the new directory you created.