RenderMan

RenderMan is a production renderer developed by Pixar for 3D animation and visual effects. It uses a physically-based ray tracing architecture and supports both CPU and GPU rendering through RenderMan XPU, aiming to handle complex production scenes while offering interactive shading, lighting, and look development workflows.

Key capabilities include the MaterialX Lama material layering system, Pixar Surface shading, physically based lighting, a machine-learning denoiser, and the Stylized Looks toolset for non-photorealistic styles such as outlines and sketch patterns. It supports native USD workflows via a Hydra delegate, including Houdini Solaris, and integrates with Autodesk Maya, SideFX Houdini, Foundry's Katana, and Blender, along with plugins such as Xgen, Yeti, and Shave and Haircut. Additional features cover volumes and particles, checkpointing for resuming interrupted renders, AOV and LPE secondary passes, holdout workflows, and cloud rendering support.

RenderMan is intended for artists, studios, and pipelines working on animation and visual effects, from look development through final frame rendering on render farms. It is available in Professional and Non-Commercial editions, with an upgrade path between versions; commercial customers receive access to training materials and support.