Autodesk Media & Entertainment
Arnold 7.2.5 is here! The latest release brings a much-improved GPU renderer, faster volume rendering, high quality curves, light AOVs in the toon shader, a text overlay imager, USDZ, and many more user experience improvements. Dive into the latest enhancements and updates below!
Access a redesigned GPU Renderer
GPU rendering Arnold gets a complete overhaul, with a large part of the GPU renderer being rewritten using NVIDIA OptiX 8. This change brings multiple improvements in startup time and rendering speed.
These improvements include: much faster startup times, lower GPU memory usage, better scaling on multiple GPUs, and faster renders overall. In benchmarks, time to first pixel on the first render is 4x to 10x faster.
Scene courtesy of Sohrab Esfehani
Faster Volume Rendering
Global light sampling is now supported in volumes. The render time speedup when using global light sampling in volumes depend on the number of lights, but even scenes with only a few lights are faster to render.
New in Arnold: Add some flair to your renders with the Overlay Imager
The Overlay is a new imager that allows you to decorate or tag your renders by printing text over the rendered images. You can include scene and system information, and render statistics, with pre-defined tokens.
New in Arnold: Work with USD files more seamlessly with enhancements to Arnold USD and USDZ
Keep your files in one place with USDZ in Arnold. Arnold USD can now directly render USDZ files without having to extract textures through kick of the USD procedural.
Arnold 7.2.5 also contains multiple USD and Hydra enhancements such as better support for scene units and orthographic camera support. Arnold USD is available both as part of the Arnold plugins and as an open source project https://github.com/Autodesk/arnold-usd.
New in Arnold: Introducing the Intel Denoiser on GPU
Arnold 7.2.5 adds support for NVIDIA and Intel GPU denoising on Windows in the Intel Denoiser. Denoising with a GPU using the Intel Denoiser should be now between 10x and 20x faster.
Create more realistic and higher quality Thick Curves quickly
Rendering thick curves is on average 10% faster, and up to twice as fast. The appearance of thick curves in close-ups is also much improved and less prone to artifacts.
Get more creative with Toon Shader Light AOVs
The Toon Shader is now capable of writing light group contribution to dedicated AOVs. Compositing the result of the Toon AOV is now easier and enables you to be more creative when creating the final image.
To learn more about the other exciting enhancements in Arnold 7.2.5, please visit the release notes.