& Construction

Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
& Manufacturing

Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
2 min read
Autodesk is focused on helping you deliver highest-quality production values and improve pipeline flexibility and scalability. With Arnold 7.2 and 7.2.1, you can enjoy native support for Apple silicon in Maya as well as stregthened USD and MaterialX support. Plus, a new distance shader and enhancements to color management workflows in 3ds Max empower you to create colorful, life-like renders that leap off the screen.
Arnold now natively supports running under Apple M series CPUs, such as the M1 CPU. The Arnold for Maya 2024 plug-in is now available as universal binaries, increasing rendering speeds by 20% in selected benchmarks compared to running Arnold in Rosetta emulation mode.
Arnold for 3ds Max now fully supports the newly added, color management workflows in the latest release of 3ds Max. This brings predictable and consistent colors that will match and fit in with the colors in the rest of your pipeline. Arnold now supports the improved OpenColorIO 2.2.1. When enabled, it relies on built-in, or self-provided, OpenColorIO configuration files. You can now change the default rendering space, define a view transform in the Arnold Render View, and change the input color space for textures default configuration.
Arnold supports color management workflows in 3ds Max
Without Color Management
With Color Management
Arnold enables the automatic generation of optimized TX textures from source textures as part of the rendering process. With this update, the automatic generation is improved and supports using texture files in scenes with different rendering color spaces. Using optimized textures is critical for rendering speed and memory usage and having the TX conversion as part of the core rendering will help those without a dedicated TX workflow to achieve faster renders.
This release contains many USD improvements and bug fixes in the USD procedural and the Hydra Render Delegate, helping you better work with heavy data sets. Arnold USD now supports MaterialX displacement shaders in USD scenes and is available both as part of the Arnold plugins and as an open-source project.
And with Arnold 7.2.1, Arnold supports MaterialX PBR shaders, faster instancing, and instanced skinned meshes in USD scenes as well as more improvements and bug fixes in the USD procedural and the Hydra Render Delegate.
The following features are available with Arnold 7.2.1.
Arnold introduces a new distance shader that uses the distance to the nearest surface to interpolate between near and far color values. You can use this shader as a powerful and artist-driven effect in procedural shading. The shader is compatible with trace sets to include or exclude objects from the distance measurement.
Distance shader
You can now use a more efficient sampling technique for lights. When enabled, the light sample settings on individual lights are ignored and the overall contribution of all lights together is computed using only a single setting. When using Global Light Sampling, the render time grows with light count at a much reduced rate. When using 10k lights, the Global Light Sampling technique is over 100x faster. Using this technique, using a non 0 low light threshold render setting is not necessary, which will help you create more accurate renders.
For the full list of improvements, visit Arnold documentation. More information and purchasing details are available here.
May we collect and use your data?
Learn more about the Third Party Services we use and our Privacy Statement.May we collect and use your data to tailor your experience?
Explore the benefits of a customized experience by managing your privacy settings for this site or visit our Privacy Statement to learn more about your options.