Arnold renderer public release and demo available

Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks, Arnold is now used at over 250 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, The Mill and Digic Pictures. Arnold was the primary renderer on dozens of films from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity. It is available as a standalone renderer on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, and is accessible through plug-ins for Maya, Softimage and Houdini.

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Fur & Hair

An efficient raytraced curve primitive makes Arnold the perfect choice for rendering fur and hair. Its hair shader has a double offset specular and is specifically designed to reduce flickering of thin hairs. The root and tip colors can be separately controlled and texture mapped.

Motion blur

Motion blur correctly interacts with shadows, volumes, indirect lighting, reflection or refraction. Deformation motion blur is extremely efficient and works for polygons, hairs and particles. Rotational motion describes precise circular arcs.

Sub-surface scattering

Our raytracing-based sub-surface scattering approach makes tuning point clouds a thing of the past. It's easy to use, requires no additional memory, supports motion-blurred lighting, interactive lighting and its performance scales optimally as more CPU threads are used.

Volumes

The volumetric rendering system is based on importance sampling and can render effects such as smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow or gases. It has the ability to interact with direct and indirect lighting from arbitrary area light sources, with full raytraced shadows and emissive properties.

Memory efficient

Thanks to Arnold's compact and highly optimized data structures, you can render scenes with hundreds of millions of unique primitives quickly and with a much lower memory footprint than is possible with other renderers.

Subdivision and displacement

Arnold supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Subdivided vertices are then vector-displaced through arbitrary shader networks. High frequencies can be automatically captured as bump map, reducing the need for excessive subdivision.

Article main photo: Halo 4, Microsoft, 343 Industries, Digic Pictures

You can learn more and try Arnold here.