RenderMan XPU is a new approach to production rendering, though not everything that you will see in RenderMan XPU is new. RenderMan XPU is in active development at Pixar, and while an external release date has not yet been set, it will be available sometime after the commercial release of RenderMan 22 – which itself delivers important new interactive capabilities.
The mission of XPU is to automatically leverage available CPU and GPU compute power to provide artists with optimum performance and flexibility on production scenes, all from within the art tools that they are already using. In this context, we present an update on RenderMan XPU. Artists are also more productive when render previews in their tools accurately reflect the look of the final frames coming off the farm. Artists require both greater interactivity and finer grained control when dealing with huge, high quality assets. With tighter production schedules, maximizing artist productivity is essential.
Film, television, and other formats call for more realism as well as more fantastic fictional realms. Demands on artists and tools continue to evolve, and scene complexity grows.
