POTA camera shader for Arnold

Zeno Pelgrims has released a new efficient camera shader for Arnold renderer. The shader is an implementation of a technique outlined in a 2016 paper called Sparse high-degree polynomials for wide-angle lenses. that allows for the rendering of images with high-order aberrations at a fraction of the cost of tracing rays through lens elements. According to Zeno, this is done by “pre-calculating fitted polynomials, which serve as a black-box to transform the rays on the sensor to rays on the outer pupil”.

Plugins for Maya and Houdini are available, but POTA is open source and free so other implementations could be created. Find out more, download the plugins and the source code from Zeno Pelgrims website.