Side Effects Software and Pixar have announced RenderMan for Houdini (RfH), a production-quality plug-in that will serve as a workflow integration bridge between RenderMan and Houdini. Developed for Pixar’s own feature film pipeline in technical collaboration with Side Effects, RfH will ship out-of-box with Houdini 15 and upcoming versions. Key benefits include support for the advanced features of RenderMan, including the RIS framework, geometric area lights, interactive rendering and a sophisticated shader suite.
RfH features:
Seamless Houdini integration – Full translation of Cameras, Lights & Geometry
Support for the latest RenderMan features
Unlimited multi-threaded rendering – Utilize the masimum amount of available threads with a single license
Support for multiple classes of light transport – Choose between Path Tracing or VCM with ease
Advanced Denoising technology – Denoiser offers speed increases for global illumination up to 10x
Image checkpointing
Image-based lighting – Full support for 32 bit HDR images along with a physical sky
Ray traced subsurface scattering – Create highly realistic skin etc. with no pre-pass or bake
Ray traced caustics
Disney’s Principled shader – Disney’s physically-based Principled BRDF
Advanced layered material system (LM Shaders)
Open VDB Support – Render volumes with a GUI dedicated to this open standard
Secondary Passes – Create AOVs and Light Path Expressions with support for Deep Textures
RIB archives – Including animated sequences, for efficient rendering and referencing assets
RiProcudural plug-ins – Procedural geometry, feathers and custom shaders.
An upcoming release will also include interactive shading and lighting. Additionally, RfH supports Pixar’s “It” RenderMan framebuffer and Pixar’s Tractor job dispatcher Artist Tools, available separately.
