Autodesk has released a feature update to Arnold, bringing it to version 7.2.3.0.
One of the major updates is the support for Global Light Sampling on GPU, making many scenes with moderate to large numbers of lights render 2-6x faster. A direct comparison with the previous GPU version shows a 48x speedup in city scenes with 100,000 lights, a 2x speedup in classical interiors with 80 lights, and a 2.6x speedup in automotive studios with 9 lights.
The distance shader has also been updated, adding the `out_distance` and `out_direction` output parameters, which return the direction and distance to the nearest surface. These additions supplement the existing color-mapped result, now available as the `out_rgb` parameter.
The shading state shaders have also seen improvements with the introduction of multiple outputs, allowing a single state shader to have various output connections in a shading network.
Additionally, there are USD enhancements, such as support for vertex UV coordinates on Curves and rendering Curves without width with a default value. The new API addition, AiProceduralExpand, enables the on-demand expansion of procedural nodes, aiding in avoiding race conditions when procedurals are not thread safe.
To learn more, read the online documentation.
