Autodesk Media & Entertainment
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.
Native Apple Silicon Support
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.
Color Management in Arnold for 3ds Max 2024
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
Improved Workflow for Texture Files
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.
USD Improvements
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.
Distance Shader
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
Global Light Sampling
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.