Unlike recent major releases from Pixar, RenderMan 26 doesn't introduce any entirely new toolsets, but it expands upon a range of key features. The most significant changes are related to RenderMan XPU - the GPU/CPU hybrid renderer introduced in RenderMan 24, which now supports a much wider range of lighting and camera features.
This includes all RenderMan analytical light types, light filters, as well as shadow and light linking, camera shutter control, tilt shift, lens aberrations, and separate diopters properties. The list of remaining features not supported in XPU can be found at the link, including mesh lighting, the Lama layer material system, and some less standard geometry types. Performance has also been improved, and support for adaptive sampling has sped up rendering.

Additionally, Pixar claims that interactivity in scenes with many lights is now significantly improved, making XPU more suitable for frame composition as well as for key lighting. Progressive pixels, the interactive refinement mode of XPU, now supports fractional iterations, allowing for even more performance tuning.

The Stylized Looks toolset for non-photorealistic rendering, also introduced in RenderMan 24, has received an update focused on workflow enhancements, including a new Canvas layer and improved AOV organization. The Stylized Control system has introduced a new artistic mode called Toon, which, unlike the existing toon shading, is not based on physics, thus expanding the range of available stylizations.

The line rendering system has received new color remapping and filtering controls, the latter allowing for smoother line renders. Additionally, the AI-driven denoising tool introduced in RenderMan 25 is now available interactively in Blender and Katana when using RIS, RenderMan's final-quality CPU rendering engine. Pixar describes the interactive denoising tool as capable of removing noise from images with very low average sample counts and as "predictive" of the results of a fully autonomous denoising tool.

It's also noted that there have been performance improvements in RIS and XPU, particularly when dealing with scenes with high sample counts and when reading textures, including EXR textures. The RenderMan statistics system has also been updated, with a new standalone application introduced to work with the data generated by the statistics portal. As for pipeline integration, RenderMan 26 now adheres to the CY2023 specification for the VFX Reference Platform, and support for Python 2 has been discontinued. In the next release, Pixar also plans to phase out the old deep texture format in favor of DeepEXR.

RenderMan 26.0 is available for Windows 10 and above, CentOS/RHEL 7.2-7.9 Linux, and macOS 10.15 and above. Plugins are compatible with Blender 3.0 and above, Houdini 19.0 and above, Katana 5.0 and above, and Maya 2022+. The Maya plugin is currently available only for RenderMan 26.0 on Windows, with Linux support to be added in a future update. RenderMan XPU is supported on Windows and Linux, requiring an NVIDIA Pascal or newer graphics processor to function.
The cost of new licenses, whether node-locked or floating licenses, is $595. There's also a free non-commercial version of RenderMan, which has also been updated to version 26.