Additional Information
Renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects!
| Latest Version | Autodesk Arnold Renderer |
| Requirements |
Windows 10/Windows 11 |
| Updated | June 25, 2023 |
| Author | Autodesk Inc |
| Category | Imaging and Digital Photo |
| License | Trial |
| Language | English |
| Download | 28 |
Overview
Autodesk Arnold Renderer is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, The app is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill, and Digic Pictures.
It 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 macOS, with supported plug-ins for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. It is the built-in interactive renderer for Maya and 3ds Max. The Arnold plug-in for Softimage is now available under an Apache2.0 open source license. It has been used in dozens of films, commercials, shorts, and video game cinematics.
This trial will enable you to download and install the latest version:
It 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 macOS, with supported plug-ins for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. It is the built-in interactive renderer for Maya and 3ds Max. The Arnold plug-in for Softimage is now available under an Apache2.0 open source license. It has been used in dozens of films, commercials, shorts, and video game cinematics.
This trial will enable you to download and install the latest version:
- Production-proven tools with simple and intuitive controls
- The stability you can count on to handle your most complex work
- Easily integrates with all top 3D DCC tools
- Highly customizable for pipeline integration
- A passionate and supportive community
- Explore the GPU beta for interactive look development and lighting
- The use of the watermarked or unwatermarked output for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
- Upon completing this process you will be able to render without a watermark for 30 days.
- This trial version is functionally identical to the commercial version.
All of the plug-ins are free to use when you buy licenses. This means you can easily switch 3D software packages without having to spend money on additional licenses.
Arnold for Maya
Provides a beautiful interface to photorealistic renderer within Autodesk’s Maya.
Arnold for Cinema 4D
Arnold for Cinema 4D (or C4DtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Cinema 4D interface.
Arnold for Houdini
Arnold for Houdini (or HtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface.
Arnold for Katana
Arnold for Katana (or KtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Katana interface.
Arnold for 3ds Max
Provides a beautiful interface to photorealistic renderer within Autodesk’s 3ds Max.
Arnold for Softimage
The plug-in for Softimage (SItoA) is no longer in active development. SItoA is now available to the community under an Apache2.0 open source license.
The renderer app is a fast, memory-efficient, and scalable physically-based raytracer. Its aim is to simplify the pipeline of VFX and animation companies with a reduced set of user interface elements, and by promoting a single pass approach removing all the associated storage and management costs.
Fur & Hair
An efficient raytraced curve primitive makes Autodesk Arnold Renderer for PC the perfect choice for rendering fur and hair using very little memory. Its hair shader has double offset speculators, transmission and is specifically designed to reduce the flickering of thin hairs.
Motion blur
Accurate 3D 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. The rotational motion describes precise circular arcs.
Sub-surface scattering
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 proprietary importance sampling algorithms and can render effects such as smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow, or fire. Volumes interact with direct and indirect lighting from arbitrary area light sources. Supports OpenVDB and MayaFluids.
Flexibility and extensibility
Thanks to an easy to use C++ API with Python bindings, TDs and programmers can integrate the app in external applications, and create custom shaders, cameras, light filters, and output drivers. It has been integrated into many apps, both commercial and proprietary.
Scalability
The program is carefully multi-threaded and makes optimal use of all available CPU threads. Even for traditionally single-threaded operations such as loading of procedural geometry, displacement, or ray accel construction. Hyper-threading provides a solid 20% speedup.
Instances
It can efficiently ray trace instances of any scene object with transformation and material overrides. It is easy to create thousands or even millions of instances resulting in trillions of renderable primitives, which is great for vegetation, large environments, and FX.
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.
Deferred geometry loading
Geometry can be created on-demand through "procedural" nodes (or stand-ins) rather than upfront. This allows the modular assembly of scenes. Procedural nodes can point to ASS, OBJ, PLY, and DLL/DSO files, opening the door to programmatic scene creation and compositing.
Subdivision and displacement
It supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Subdivided vertices are then vector-displaced through arbitrary shader networks. High frequencies can be automatically captured as a bump map, reducing the need for excessive subdivision.
Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs)
It can render any number of AOVs or passes for compositing purposes, including normal, Z-depth, position, and ID masks. It also supports deep image data. Shaders can create their own custom outputs (such as direct and indirect diffuse, specular, SSS, etc).
Standalone command-line renderer
It has a native scene description format stored in human-readable text files (Scene Source, or .ass). These files are easily edited, can be read and written with the C/Python API, can be lazily loaded at render time, or can be fed to the command-line renderer, kick.
Note: 30 days trial version.
