Hey everyone, I wanted to open a parenthesis with this post about the integration of RenderMan 27.2, its Substance Painter plugin, and how everything works with Blender 4.5 and 5.0.
At first, things went pretty badly. I tried RenderMan 25, 26 and their minor updates, and in those versions the XPU engine wasn’t fully compatible, which I mistakenly took as poor Blender integration. My bad.
I’ve now tried version 27.2 again, and everything works really, really well. It’s practically the same feature set as in Maya or Houdini.
I experienced some crashes at the start – another mistake on my part: XPU is super designed to push CPU and GPU (or multiple GPUs) together, incorporating modern tech like ILM’s LAMA nodes.
The crashes happen because, being built for speed, a GPU like mine (RTX 4070 12 GB) falls a little short. For preview, 16 or 18 GB is ideal; for final renders I’d recommend GPUs with 24 GB or more. Even so, the XPU CPU+GPU combo on my i7-13700 and 4070 is more than enough to work comfortably with OptiX in Blender’s viewport.
In my personal character projects it holds up fine with 12 GB, but there’s a chance of crashing and needing to switch to CPU-only XPU.
Once I understood that, I saw the light: today RenderMan is quite complete in Blender, and the fact that its Substance Painter plugin works so well is a huge bonus.
I recreated this bottle-and-cookies scene following the old official “Milk and Cookies” tutorial by Harsh Agrawal for lighting and scene layout; I built the materials from scratch using LAMA nodes (the original tutorial uses PxrSurface). I settled on ACEScg after lots of testing, and here’s the result.
I 100% recommend RenderMan with Blender today.
Cheers!
