Arnold 5.2 released
Solid Angle has announced the release of Arnold 5.2 with several new features in addition to performance and usability improvements.
Shaders have been improved with the addition of a new Cell Noise shader that can be used to create cell-like patterns. The colour of each cell is controlled using a palette parameter enabling the creation of patterns with colours chosen from a specific palette. The Surface shader has been enhanced with the addition of a new Sheen function that renders microfibre effects such as can be found on cloth or peach fuzz on a face.
Native render to texture workflows are now supported. In 3DS Max the UI has been extended to expose most of Arnold’s AOVs as baking elements. Also, several native Max baking elements are now supported, including: CompleteMap, DiffuseMap, SpecularMap, ShadowsMap, LightingMap, AlphaMap, Ambient Occlusion (MR). New built-in Volume ID and Depth AOVs give users more control when rendering volumes.
Performance improvements include a 2x – 3x speed boost for adaptive subdivision on a single thread, added to this it is now multi-threaded to exploit the power of multi-core systems. There are also Alembic procedural improvements, and deeper integration with Cryptomatte in addition to improvement to the two denoisers added in 5.1. Memory consumption of the OptiX denoiser has been reduced in proportion to the number of denoised AOVs and there are several bug fixes for the ‘noice’ denoiser to improve stability and usability.
Arnold is now rental only at a cot of $615 per year or $65 per month. Discounts are available for packs of multiple purchases.
See the full list of changes in this release in the Arnold Documentation.
Give us Arnold GPU already!
On siggraph nvidia booth they have Arnold gpu rendering an asset from spiderman movie, with the new RTX graphic cards and lighting speed!