Autodesk Media & Entertainment
The latest Arnold release amplifies rendering performance, interactivity, and reliability allowing you to deliver beautiful results faster. Performance is significantly upgraded, scalability on GPU is greatly improved, and fullframe imagers are now updated during rendering. This release also adds production-ready USD enhancements for specific procedurals and shapes in Hydra, deep AOVs, light linking, and more.
- Boosted performance
- Enhanced post-processing nodes
- Technical improvements
- GPU scalability
- USD enhancements
Boosted performance
- The geomSideness flag has been added to the exporter
- Restrictions on when prims can be grouped have been added
- The Proxyshape node now has shareable stage support
- Improved imagers refresh rate in IPR
- Faster filter performance in progressive rendering
- Speedier OSL textures
- Improved color management support
- Multiple render sessions
Enhanced post-processing nodes
This release continues to build on Arnold’s post-processing nodes (or imagers) toolset to allow you to fine-tune post-processing effects and see them update right in the render view. Also introduced are new imagers for denoising and LUT-based tone mapping.
- The geomSideness flag has been added to the exporter
- Restrictions on when prims can be grouped have been added
- The Proxyshape node now has shareable stage support
- A fast, high quality Intel denoiser
- Improved AI denoising
- More control over brightness and color curves
- Tweak shadows and curves with LUT-based tone mapping
Technical improvements
- Better subsurface spread with SS sets with randomwalk
- Added support for MaterialX v1.38
- Multiple outputs for shaders
GPU scalability
Arnold continues to improve on its GPU toolset with reduced VRAM use for polymeshes and volumes, and added support for matte.
- Reduced VRAM use for polymeshes
- Reduced VRAM use for volumes
- Matte support
USD enhancements
Arnold continues to collaborate with top studios to add production-ready USD improvements. This release includes added USD support for UsdImaging adapters, deep rendering, procedural path mapping, and more. Several performance improvements have also been added.
- USD 21.08: The procedural included in the core SDK is now built using USD 21.08
- UsdImaging adapters: You can now transparently use Arnold specific procedurals and shapes in Hydra
- Deep rendering: The render delegate now supports rendering of deep AOVs
- Multiple frames in a single file: The USD writer is now able to append multiple frames to a single USD file
- Hydra scene delegate: Arnold-USD now includes an experimental scene delegate for Hydra
- Improved performance when rendering with Husk: Progressive rendering is now disabled when rendering via husk in Houdini Solaris
- Procedural Path Mapping: The procedural now supports Arnold Path Mapping when loading USD files
- Motion Blur using Velocity and Acceleration: The render delegate now extrapolates point positions if velocity or acceleration primvars exist
- Light Linking: The USD procedural now supports light linking
- Fast camera updates: The render delegate now handles camera only updates more efficiently, improving interactivity