RenderMan 27: All You Need to Know

Pixar has published the beta notes for RenderMan 27, calling it the most significant release of the production renderer for VFX and animation in “over a decade.”

The major news is that RenderMan XPU, the software’s hybrid CPU/GPU render engine, is will be ready for final-frame rendering, as well as interactive previews. This updated version of XPU will be included in the free non-commercial edition and supported in integration plugins for Blender, Houdini, Katana, and Maya.

RenderMan XPU Ready for Final Production

The biggest change in RenderMan 27 is that RenderMan XPU has achieved full readiness for final-frame rendering.

XPU was introduced in RenderMan 24 (in 2021) as a fast alternative to the CPU-only RIS architecture for look development and interactive rendering, but it lacked crucial features for final-frame workflows.

Elio RIS vs XPU (source: Pixar)

In RenderMan 27, XPU is now much closer to RIS in terms of capability, producing “renders that are predictive of RIS.” Pixar even began rendering the upcoming Toy Story 5 using RIS but switched to XPU during production, using “the same shaders, the same lights, the same assets.”

RenderMan XPU is described as “just a faster renderer” than RIS, even when using the CPU alone. Although RIS is still available in RenderMan 27, it is scheduled to be deprecated in a future release, and studios are encouraged to adopt XPU for new projects.

Key Workflow Improvements in XPU

Most of the new features in RenderMan 27 are capabilities that were previously exclusive to RIS but are now supported in XPU.

Better support for VFX compositing workflows

XPU now supports essential compositing capabilities, including mattes, holdouts, and deep output. For deep compositing, RenderMan now fully supports OpenEXR Deep IDs, including the ability to automatically generate OpenEXR 3.0-style ID manifests.

A simple scene rendered in layers and composed in Nuke using DeepEXR (source: Pixar)

Note: The popular Cryptomatte matte ID system is not supported in RenderMan 27.0, but will be added in a future 27.x update.

Support for New AI denoiser and Stylized Looks

XPU now supports two major recent features: the interactive denoiser (introduced in RenderMan 25) which uses AI to quickly clean up noise, and the Stylized Looks toolset (for cartoon, sketch-like, and painterly looks).

Stylized Looks: Distort option for line rendering (source: Pixar)

Shading and Lighting Features

For look development, XPU supports more shading features, including full support for Open Shading Language (OSL) display filters, initial support for MaterialX BSDF nodes, and full support for MaterialX Lama (layered material system) in the final release. XPU now fully supports mesh lights and interior volume aggregates.

MaterialX Lama (source: Pixar)

Multi-GPU Rendering and Checkpointing

Significant workflow improvements include checkpointing, which allows XPU to save and resume interrupted renders from partial frames.

XPU now supports multiple GPUs in both hybrid and GPU-only modes, helping to maximize use of hardware resources when rendering on GPU farms. However, the entire scene must still fit into the memory of each GPU.

Remaining Limitations

While XPU is rapidly becoming a viable replacement, a few limitations remain in RenderMan 27:

Complex Lighting: RIS remains the preferred choice for scenes with several thousand lights and for “very difficult” scenarios like underwater caustics, as XPU does not support certain light transport algorithms (like bidirectional path tracing and photon mapping).
Other Limitations: XPU does not support baking workflows, still does not render some types of geometry, particularly NURBS and quadrics, and still requires an NVIDIA GPU (Windows and Linux only). Pixar plans to support Macs with Apple Silicon processors in a dot release, but XPU support on Mac is not yet confirmed.

Pipeline and DCC Integration Updates

RenderMan 27 significantly improves pipeline compatibility by aligning with the VFX Reference Platform CY2024 standard. All bridge plugins for key DCC software—Blender, Houdini, Katana, and Maya—have been updated to fully support the new XPU features.

Texture Workflow: The Texture Manager now uses OpenImageIO by default for mipmapped texture conversion, which speeds up processing and replaces Pixar’s proprietary .tx format with the more standard OpenEXR.
Blender and Houdini: Blender users gain support for native light linking and workflow improvements like a UI button to easily stop and restart IPR (Interactive Preview Render) sessions. Houdini users benefit from extended support for the Solaris look development and layout toolset.

Licensing, Availability, and System Requirements

RenderMan 27 is currently available in beta; Pixar has not yet announced a final public release date.

System Compatibility: RenderMan 27 supports Windows 10+, macOS 12.0+, and glibc 2.34+ Linux (equivalent to RHEL 9+). RenderMan XPU requires an NVIDIA Pascal GPU or newer and is supported on Windows and Linux only.
Pricing: New perpetual and node-locked floating licenses cost $845, which is a $250 increase from the RenderMan 26.3 release.
Free Edition: The Non-Commercial RenderMan edition, which is free for education, demo reels, and tools development, has also been updated to include the latest version of RenderMan XPU.

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