New Features

• Reorganized RenderMan Globals
  • New Camera, Reyes and Rays Panels
• PRMan 11 Support
  • Support for Ray Tracing, Indirect Illumination, and Photon Maps.
  • Deep Shadows, which are as easy to generate as a standard shadow map using the new Shadow Map template
  • New Map Types: Global and Caustic Photon Maps
  • Double Sided Shading
  • Pyramid Shadows
• Miscellaneous
  • New "Edit Associated Appearances" command opens Slim appearances attached to active Maya objects. 
  • Support for MTOR-only vis/invis attribute (mtorInvis). The interface can be found in MTOR's Attributes menu.

Enhancements

• You can now attach RIB boxes and RIB generators to Maya Plugin Shape nodes.
• You can now ignore Maya object instancing for shading purposes.  The new pref has been added to mtor.ini. A related enhancement results in MTOR automatically assigning a constant vertex variable indicating the Maya instance id of a primitive.  If the pref is set, an non-instance primitive won't have the primitive variable attached. 
• You can now cause MTOR to output all polygon meshes as subdivision meshes.  The new pref is controlled in mtor.in.
• MTOR now outputs named coordinate systems useful for specifying environment map accesses.  These include:  "_XTOZ", "_YTOZ", "_world_lefthanded", and "_environment".
• A variable called $SCENEDIR in the scripting context is intitialized to the directory of the maya file before the RAT workspace file is read, so it can be included in workspace search paths. Then slim can resolve external palettes relative to the maya scene location.

Bug Fixes

• Incomplete UV sets on poly meshes are no longer ignored.
• Coordinate systems with rib boxes attached should obey rules for trace set grouping output.
• When archiver appearances were deleted without first being detached, their geometry would disappear from subsequent renders.
• Particle instancers which lacked instanced objects would cause mtor to crash during RIB generation.
• Scripting render globals from mel via the "mtor control getvalue/setvalue -rg" commands sometimes caused Maya for Linux to crash. In particular, setting a value to an empty string was dangerous and getting a value without first invoking "mtor control getvalue -sync" was dangerous.
• RIB generation would sometimes fail on scenes where the visibility of objects was animated with motion blur enabled.
• Adaptors now work on Maya mesh components. (#2296)
• Primary Visibility no longer prevents object from appearing in reflection.
• Freeze Pref now works when selected objects have same names, but different paths.   

New in MTOR 4.5.1 (for RAT Release 5.5.1)

Enhancements

• Maya 5.0 Support
  Maya 5.0 now supported on IRIX, Linux, and Windows. Linux users are required to use the Red Hat 7.3 build for Maya 5.0 support on Linux. This distribution will run on either Red Hat 7.2 or 7.3.
  

• Multiple MTOR's Now Only Consume 1 License Per Host
  Added support for grouping duplicate license requests which come from the same user and host for Slim and MTOR. Specifically, the licensing behavior of Maya is now emulated in only checking out a single license for multiple instances on the same host (by the same user).
  
  This feature must be enabled in the RAT.ini. To enable the new licensing behavior simply edit the following line in the RAT.ini file:
  
  SetPref GroupLicenses 1 (This is set to "0" or off by default)
  
  New functionality requires an upgrade of RAT Applications on ALL hosts to version 5.5.1. If your facility requires that you run both current and legacy versions of the RAT applications, you may wish to download and install the new License-2.0 license server which supports both types of license checkouts. The new License-2.0 license server does not require a new license.

Important Note on New Licensing Features: With License-1.0, if older versions of the app have licenses checked out (regardless of which host), the new version of the app will revert to the old behavior of consuming a license per instance of the app. In the reverse scenario, if a new version of the app has a license checked out and an old version attempts to check out the license, a license mismatch error will occur.

• Remote Preflight Now Supported
  
  Preflight commands can now be run remotely, based on compute location in RenderMan Globals.
  
  In previous releases, even when selecting distributed rendering, preflight operations and resultant texture and shadow creation always took place on the local processor. In RAT 5.5.1, if the compute location is set to "remote", the standalone mtor preflight job will be run remotely. The resultant commands from the preflight expand (generally txmake commands) will run either locally or remotely depending upon an entry in the mtor.ini file.
  
  In order for expanded commands within the preflight to run remotely you must define a service key entry for
  
  "TxMakeSvc"
  
  in the mtor.ini file. This is not set by default.
  
  Leaving the TxMakeSvc defined as {} in the mtor.ini file (default configuration) will cause the txmake commands to be run on the local processor.
  
  A suitable choice may be pixarRender (although a render slot will be consumed during txmake in this case) or simply define a custom service key and allocate appropriate servers in the alfred.schedule file.
  
  These commands and paths will be dirmapped to allow cross-platform support.
  
• MTOR Now Supports Vertex Color Data
  This may be useful when rendering scenes that have Maya "Paint Effects to Polygon" conversions present or where vertex color information has been painted onto polygonal surfaces in Maya.
  
  Paint Effects to Polygon Conversion in Maya properly rendered by RenderMan

Bug Fixes

• Animated lofts now animate properly in all circumstances. A check was also added for the new boolean attribute "rmanDeforming" which forces an update on geometry normally cached during rib generation where objects with history may not be animating properly.
  

• Fixed a crashing bug in MTOR related to filtering selections by "_Selected (Computed)" on geometry with RIB generators attached.
  

• Lightlist bug fixed