Arnold 7.2.2.0 released

Autodesk has announced the release of Arnold 7.2.2.0, bringing a range of improvements that streamline user experience and optimises rendering performance. One notable improvement is the increased responsiveness during interactive modification of large scenes.

The global light sampling performance has been enhanced in many situations, notably with indirect lighting, making the workflow more efficient. Further technical advances include the reduction of numerical precision differences across CPU vendors. This enhancement ensures that images rendered on different CPUs such as Intel, AMD, and Apple, are perceptually identical.

Users will also notice a significant decrease in noise when using a mesh light with very small triangles in volumes. Furthermore, the OCIO color manager now uses a built-in configuration when a file name isn’t provided, and the OCIO environment variable is undefined. This differs from the previous response, where the system would issue a warning and not apply any color conversions.

The latest release also includes enhancements in the USD department. It now supports rendering MaterialX nodes using third-party node definitions. Additionally, users can now see the Arnold render status and estimated render time in the viewport annotation. Arnold 7.2.2.0 also brings support for the AI_RAY_SUBSURFACE visibility flag in the render delegate and procedural.

There are also several API additions to assist in memory allocation tracking, forcing node updates, and loading third-party MaterialX node definitions.

Find out more in the release notes