According to Solid Angle, developers of the Arnold Renderer, their current focus is to develop bridge plugins for Maya and Softimage, and alongside this they are also working on Houdini and Katana. A dedicated plugin for 3DS Max is not currently being developed but the company is interested in hearing from Max users who would like to use Arnold with 3DS Max, in order to consider developing such a plugin. Those interested can write them a message through their contact form.
Arnold for 3DS Max?
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I already asked told them recently that many max users are very interested in getting an Arnold plugin.
I am curious to why max users would be interested? admittedly I have very very very limited experience with arnold render, so it’s more an oblivious questions than a rant on arnold.
But the reason I ask is because for me and the work I do, Vray 3.0 is the holy grail of what most seem to be waiting for, and not a lot of renders I think can compete there.
Maybe im wrong?
From what I’ve heard, it’s because it’s very simple and straight forward and a renderer that is really geared towards VFX over general purpose. As a person that does FX, and sometimes have to light – the less I have to tweak and think about to get a great image with the least amount of time is a great tool to have.
I mean, that’s my take on it speaking as a Max user.
Vray is great, I’ve been using it since 2001, but I’ll stop using it when Arnold is released for max. I worked several times with Arnold and I felt like a pure artist again, not a tweaker of a renderer. Arnold has very few options, it’s fast, more accurate then Vray, it’s realy made for artists from the beginning.
Now that Arnold retail is available for Maya am thinking of switching to Maya.
Bigger variety means more options. I wish Arnold will be option for me too one day. 🙂
Btw checkout Corona renderer. Very fast and easy.
@Thomas
To be honest why wouldn’t max users be interested? Having 1 more solid renderer available for your software package of choice can’t hurt.
I realize that this is kinda a non answer but this is how I feel about this subject.
it’s just not fair – the renderer that was originally designed for running with 3ds max supports any package except max. 🙂 For the justice it should be and should be free! )
im sad to see that max has fallen to this level. to that level the users have to ask for 3rd party developers to develop their stuff for max. it make me feel like an outcast.
I’ve always found it borderline amusing and a bit sad how they do their best to convince themselves Max doesn’t exist, a shame.
As for their ‘survey’, it could’ve and should’ve been done years ago, that’s why I don’t think their ‘interest’ is genuine enough.
No worries though, and we all know why. 😉
We need more users to comunicate with a Solid Angle.
This is official respond from developers:
“The current focus is Maya and Softimage since that’s what the big and medium-sized animation and VFX studios use, and that’s where most of our sales are. Alongside this we are also working on Houdini and Katana. There have been some requests for C4D, Lightwave and 3dsmax, but it will be a while until we can spend time developing for those packages – writing a solid plugin is really hard and time consuming. The more people that request this however, the higher the priority this will become for us.”
Why a new renderer?
Why Arnold?
what are his best points?
faster?
easier?
stronger?
thierry, please read “Features” and conclude how much you need Arnold in 3ds max:
https://www.solidangle.com/arnold/features/
Arnolds SSS for example is very fast and looks great. MBlur is fast. It is really geared fr vfx. VRay is geared for arch-viz and viz in general me thinks sometimes. It’s their biggest clients so it makes sense. But it’s slow as hell render times with many transparency maps (think mapped leaves or snow flakes on planes in a particle system) and issues with motion blur with changing topology is troublesome for vfx (think box#2 tearing or TP volume breaking). I would welcome Arnold for max!!!
@thomas
Please don’t limit our world of CG/VFX to you narrow minded vision of what is a good engine or not for 3dsMAX.
Everybody has his own use of an engine, and it looks like you never really met the limits of yours. That’s it.
Vray is a wonderful engine but EXTREMELY expensive in production. You really can’t use mblur, zdepth or Displace in a heavy prod without using behemoths render nodes which are not reality right now.
Arnold will render almost everything in a handkerchief, more or less 4 to 8 gig and you are done. Vray isn’t a REYES engine while ARNOLD is.
Again, I love Vray, but my love for it stop here, good for stills, archViz and simple motion. After I will need to meet Rockfeller’s son or similar 😉
Chhers,
Hi guys – thanks so much for showing your interest in Arnold! Just a few comments: This “survey” wasn’t our idea. We are not ignoring 3dsmax, we just have to pick our battles carefully, given our limited resources. So far, our business model was to sell hundreds of licenses to studios with big render farms, and there just aren’t any of those using 3dsmax. As we grow, we can start supporting smaller studios which don’t buy that many licenses. Also, please understand that writing a quick and dirty 3dsmax is easy, but writing a robust one is not – it’s taking us years to develop the Maya and Softimage plugins, and they are still not perfect 🙂
Thanks for the extra information, Marcos.
Just wanted to note that we did not intend to do a survey, either. We just noticed people’s interest and inquired Solid Angle about future plans, then reported on it. As we’ve done in the past with other companies that did not include 3DS Max in their public announcements.
@Tanguy: Thomas only asked about others’ opinions. Your attack is completely gratuitous. Next time you write a message with such attitude it will be filtered. Kindness and courtesy are a requirement here.
“Again, I love Vray, but my love for it stop here, good for stills, archViz and simple motion.”
It’s probably good for more than that, too. V-Ray has successfully been used in a great number of films, as their film reels attest, and I’m sure the production companies have taken into account rendering costs, since their budgeting is always done under pressure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CACbekH2RrY
All renderers have their pros and cons.
Vray user since 2003, Arnold user in XSI for the past 2 years.
I LOVE arnold. Vray is a great renderer and when jt came out it wiped the floor with the competition. It took a while before the maya guys got to realize its very powerful potential.
With that said I am constantly amazed with arnold. In addition to having the ability to write your own shaders it’s a joy to use. It’s a highly efficient raytracer and it doesn’t cheat with anything. The new v 3 release has some great features.
I’d love it for max but understand the limitations SA have. I really hope Marcos and the team find the resources for a max port soon. I think they would be surprised to see the amount of licenses they would sell.
I totally forgot about it but there is a thread on cgsociety where is “fanmade” Arnold plugin for 3ds max is being worked on. Here is the link for people interested:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=183&t=1111777&page=1&pp=15
Marcos,
like everywhere, people don’t need while they don’t have it. Just remember succefull stories where FumeFX, Krakatoa, Thinking Particles and lot of other FX plugins came out for 3dsmax, not for any other 3d giant. There is big potential here.
I have absolutely no experience with Arnold. I use vray sonce many years and totally love it too. But the reason why I am interested in Arnold is because I saw a lot of amazing results in movies and game cinematics rendered in Arnold and I heard it is fast. I also heard it is complicated to create shaders in Arnold, but I don’t know why someone told me that. The price tag could be a huge factor too. Now vray is increasing its price so I would be curious if arnold for max could create some competiton for vray.
If you want an Arnold plugin for max please ask here:
http://www.solidangle.com/arnold/pricing/contact
Completely agree with what Deko said. there is hard to find an artist in those big studios that didn’t use 3dsmax at any part of their career. and if you really need your product to grow, i think you must feed the roots of the industry with it- where 3dsmax still shines. then those artists will take it with them to the top.
and most of all, if its so easy and less time consuming to write for max, then why not take it as a blessing.. i mean from spending a small amount of time, you can get the attention of almost entire max community, which is still massive, (that i believe even will outnumber the licence amount you hope to sell to the big studios)
i personally think that your current strategy is poor. cause if you are just feeding your product to top branches, in next big season, when next big thing hits the ground, you will loose your position. cause you have no support from the small users. (your product will be just a seasonal sensation)
I don’t think this may effect vray popularity much. they have a huge user base; if they come with something better than yours, community will embrace it in no time – because of their stronghold. that stronghold is there, because of their strategy; they first released it for max (the root part of the industry) and slowly moved it to maya and results are wonderful.
and most of all, there are still medium sized houses like pixomondo, blur, uncharted-territory and scanline. (and there are more for sure) that uses 3dsmax exclusively.
This is just my POV. I just see that most successful plugging/ third party stuff sellers started with max.
and we all know that how bad it is, feeding only the top part of the industry, recently we witness big companies trying this strategy and lately realizing how wrong it is.. 😉
so guys, be sensitive to the root people and they will take your product with them to the top.
@Jocelyn:
I don’t see how price tag would help there. Arnold is WAY more expensive than VRay currently especially since rendernodes cost the same as gui lics.
Arnold for Cinema4D by “Ugly Kids”:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=1149612
If SolidAngle can’t make separate plugin for every 3d software, maybe it’s a good idea just to let (and help!) 3rd party developers to make own bridges.
Well…After movie GRAVITY I am definitely interested in ARNOLD RENDER Plug’n
Well, considering the news about Softimage, they might well be thinking a bit more about a Max bridge.
Or some other app to fill the SI gap.
sent in my request.
Tanguy,
Lots of people have quite successfully used vray in production with displacement, motion blur and depth of field in reasonable times. Version 3 has been simplified in lots of ways and brute force rendering has been sped up hugely also so it’s way easier to go from animation to render for animated objects with less steps than before and not have to worry about any kind of undersampling.
Arnold is also a raytracer, the same as vray and not a reyes renderer which renderman is!
Most people use Vray for Max, or Mental Ray but Arnold has a look to it that I like.
Seems odd not to dev a plugin for such a huge user base.
@Marcos,
I would love to have a conversation. Contact me directly so we can talk.
Eddie Perlberg
Product Manager
3ds Max
Still awaiting news on developments here. I would argue that the userbase for 3dsmax is ENORMOUS compared to many others – but the current Arnold business model seems aimed at large studios rather than individuals or smaller setups.
Hope to see progress here soon.
why might max users be interested in arnold?
explore the subtleties within lee griggs gallery:
http://www.leegriggs.com/335056/gallery
lee is also creating documentation and tutorials for the Arnold renderer; including Maya, Softimage, Houdini and CINEMA 4D.
they are certainly missing a big market in max users..
why max users might not be interested in arnold:
it’s twice as expensive
I’ve been working primarily with 3ds max for about a decade now and I’m actually switching to rending with Maya to allow me to use Arnold. There’s a shortage of good render options in 3ds max in my opinion as your best options are mental ray or Vray which both require a huge amount of counter intuitive tweaking to make work and are both really quite slow in a lot of circumstances. for these reasons I think 3ds max actually needs Arnold a lot more than Maya does where its even possible to produce pretty good looking renders using the software’s own render engine. so Yes ! yes yes yes please release a version for the max community when you get the time because we need it more than anyone else does, we have the best modelling tools in any software and a tragic lack of options when we want to make our models look realistic.
I wonder if we have some news about this.
With Vray you can achieve a whole 3d scene, amazingly photorealistic, fully animated, mblured from vray camera, and render a flickering free sequence at 1280*720 frame in just 5 to 8 minutes per frame! I don`t even do any postpro, really. The frames are great as they come out from Vray.
Why you need another renderer???
VFX are even faster because the renderer doesn`t have to consider a full scene.
So… why Arnold? I`ve never tested Arnold but I`m pretty sure it won`t render a 1280*720 full scene in 8 minutes because is an unbiased engine.