The Skinny on ARNOLD Renderer- Epilogue

Global illumination system incorporating modern ray tracing and physically based shading techniques, which offers greater speed, more power and higher quality. This gives studios using Arnold a distinct competitive advantage – especially in big-budget productions.

One of the most interesting and successfully expanding renderers is Arnold. A fully ray tracing solution, it has gained tremendous credibility in the last few years at the high end especially in major vfx feature films and animated features. Sony Pictures Imageworks was the catalyst for the professional adoption of the product, but its use and reputation have blossomed to places such as Digital Domain, ILM, Luma Pictures, Framestore, Digic Pictures and others.

The product is ‘hot’ and yet remarkably unavailable. If you go to the Solid Angle web site you will be greeted with just a logo (and an equation if you can find it). No sales page, no specs, no PR, no user stories – nothing. Still the program is considered by many to be massively important, and its adoption is spreading just on word of mouth, amongst high end facilities.

Arnold was started by Spaniard Marcos Fajardo, but while he lived in the USA. Today Fajardo is still the chief architect of the “Arnold” at Solid Angle and the company is back based in Europe.

What’s new in 0.19

Version 0.19.0 of MtoA is based on version 4.0.9.1 of the Arnold core.

New features include:

- Reduced texture I/O: Ray differentials, used to calculate texture sampling footprints, have been improved for the different ray types, which can produce dramatic speedups in scenes with large numbers of high-resolution texture maps.
- Faster bump mapping: 25% less shader evaluations per call.
- Faster ray accel build: 25% less time to build the ray acceleration structures. Memory usage and ray tracing speed are unaffected.
- Cached of standins pointing to an .ass file: This feature can potentially save a lot of both memory and disk I/O. Because of the experimental nature of this feature, users who want to try it must manually enable it with the global option enable_procedural_cache in the User Options string field in the Render Settings.
- Bumpdiff mode in the utility shader: This mode will show how far the bump and autobump normals vary from the base smooth-shaded normals as a heatmap (blue is the same, going through green to red as varying up to 90 degrees away). This is useful for debugging the balance between subdivision iterations with displacement vs autobump making up for the rest.

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