Solid Angle has released Arnold 5

Artikel Arnold, Artikel Arnold for 3ds Max, Artikel Arnold For Cinema 4D, Artikel KATANA, Artikel MAXtoA, Artikel MtoA,
[ #Arnold #SolidAngle #Rendering ]
Solid Angle releases major Arnold 5.0 update with improved performance and new shaders, bundled with 3ds Max 2018.

Highlight Enhancements in Arnold 5.0:

• Shaders:
- Standard Surface: a new standard_surface shader was added, with intuitive and energy conserving parameters, a secondary specular coat with separate normal, metallic Fresnel, thin surface support and more. The standard shader is still available but considered deprecated.
- Standard Hair: a new physically based standard_hair shader was added, with much more accurate specular and transmissive scattering, better diffuse scattering for dirty hair, melanin randomization, and simple and intuitive parameters. The older hair shader is still available but considered deprecated.
- Standard Volume: a new standard_volume shader was added, usable for rendering a wide variety of volumes. The shader provides independent control of density, scattering color and transparency, in a way that is energy conserving by default. Fire can be rendered using blackbody emission driven by temperature. Displacement can be used to add more detail to volumes. This supersedes the density volume shader, which has been removed.
- Utility shader: the utility shader has been enhanced with a new metal shading mode, and a roughness control has been added that affects plastic and metal modes.
• OSL, Closures and AOVs:
- Open Shading Language: shaders can now be written in Open Shading Language, an advanced shading language for production GI renderers. OSL shaders placed in the shader search path are automatically registered as Arnold shader nodes, with their parameters converted to Arnold parameters. Once loaded, they can be inspected, instantiated and linked in exactly the same way as C++ shaders. OSL shaders can be used to implement texture patterns and materials using closures
- Closures: a new closure parameter type has been added, which shaders can output instead of final colors. There are BSDF, BSSRDF, emission, matte, transparency and volume closures. See the API documentation and examples for more details on how to use these. Linking a color to a closure parameter will automatically create an emission closure with that color. A closure parameter however can't be linked or converted to a color, as the integrator only computes lighting after shader evaluation.
- Light group AOVs: surface shaders now natively support light group AOVs, previously this feature was only available for volume shading.
- Light path expressions: light path expressions are used to write lighting components into separate AOVs. No longer should individual shaders define AOVs for direct/indirect light and various layers, rather a regular expression syntax is used to define the subset of all scattering and emission events in the scene that should be written to each AOV. Built-in AOVs are available for the common cases.

• Color Management
- Linear color spaces: any linear color space can now be specified through the color manager for any output driver that supports halfs or floats.
- Color Managers: custom color_manager nodes can now be implemented to handle input and output color transforms. A color manager is a package similar to SynColor or OpenColorIO. If no color manager is specified in options.color_manager, Arnold will use the built-in one which supports linear (no transform), sRGB and Rec709 (non linear)

• Sampling
- Dithered sampling: most samplers (e.g. soft shadows, indirect illumination, depth of field) will now take advantage of dithered sampling, which improves the visual distribution of noise specially at low sample rates.
- Quad lights: sampling has been improved, reducing noise for surface lighting. For comparisons with the previous sampler, options.enable_new_quad_light_sampler can be disabled.
- Cylinder lights: sampling has been improved, significantly reducing noise for cylinder lights in volumes or where cylinder lights are located near other surfaces.
- Disk lights: a novel sampling algorithm has been implemented for disk lights which can greatly improve their rendering quality when shading points near the disk's surface, particularly in volumes

You can read the full release features HERE.

>> See Also: Arnold for Maya Guide


Chad Ashley from Greyscalegorilla has shares his favorite features in brand new Arnold 5 update.

  More Arnold Plugin [post_ad]
[ #Arnold #SolidAngle #Rendering ]
Solid Angle releases major Arnold 5.0 update with improved performance and new shaders, bundled with 3ds Max 2018.

Highlight Enhancements in Arnold 5.0:

• Shaders:
- Standard Surface: a new standard_surface shader was added, with intuitive and energy conserving parameters, a secondary specular coat with separate normal, metallic Fresnel, thin surface support and more. The standard shader is still available but considered deprecated.
- Standard Hair: a new physically based standard_hair shader was added, with much more accurate specular and transmissive scattering, better diffuse scattering for dirty hair, melanin randomization, and simple and intuitive parameters. The older hair shader is still available but considered deprecated.
- Standard Volume: a new standard_volume shader was added, usable for rendering a wide variety of volumes. The shader provides independent control of density, scattering color and transparency, in a way that is energy conserving by default. Fire can be rendered using blackbody emission driven by temperature. Displacement can be used to add more detail to volumes. This supersedes the density volume shader, which has been removed.
- Utility shader: the utility shader has been enhanced with a new metal shading mode, and a roughness control has been added that affects plastic and metal modes.
• OSL, Closures and AOVs:
- Open Shading Language: shaders can now be written in Open Shading Language, an advanced shading language for production GI renderers. OSL shaders placed in the shader search path are automatically registered as Arnold shader nodes, with their parameters converted to Arnold parameters. Once loaded, they can be inspected, instantiated and linked in exactly the same way as C++ shaders. OSL shaders can be used to implement texture patterns and materials using closures
- Closures: a new closure parameter type has been added, which shaders can output instead of final colors. There are BSDF, BSSRDF, emission, matte, transparency and volume closures. See the API documentation and examples for more details on how to use these. Linking a color to a closure parameter will automatically create an emission closure with that color. A closure parameter however can't be linked or converted to a color, as the integrator only computes lighting after shader evaluation.
- Light group AOVs: surface shaders now natively support light group AOVs, previously this feature was only available for volume shading.
- Light path expressions: light path expressions are used to write lighting components into separate AOVs. No longer should individual shaders define AOVs for direct/indirect light and various layers, rather a regular expression syntax is used to define the subset of all scattering and emission events in the scene that should be written to each AOV. Built-in AOVs are available for the common cases.

• Color Management
- Linear color spaces: any linear color space can now be specified through the color manager for any output driver that supports halfs or floats.
- Color Managers: custom color_manager nodes can now be implemented to handle input and output color transforms. A color manager is a package similar to SynColor or OpenColorIO. If no color manager is specified in options.color_manager, Arnold will use the built-in one which supports linear (no transform), sRGB and Rec709 (non linear)

• Sampling
- Dithered sampling: most samplers (e.g. soft shadows, indirect illumination, depth of field) will now take advantage of dithered sampling, which improves the visual distribution of noise specially at low sample rates.
- Quad lights: sampling has been improved, reducing noise for surface lighting. For comparisons with the previous sampler, options.enable_new_quad_light_sampler can be disabled.
- Cylinder lights: sampling has been improved, significantly reducing noise for cylinder lights in volumes or where cylinder lights are located near other surfaces.
- Disk lights: a novel sampling algorithm has been implemented for disk lights which can greatly improve their rendering quality when shading points near the disk's surface, particularly in volumes

You can read the full release features HERE.

>> See Also: Arnold for Maya Guide


Chad Ashley from Greyscalegorilla has shares his favorite features in brand new Arnold 5 update.

  More Arnold Plugin [post_ad]

Arnold v0.5 for 3ds Max 2017

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Arnold, Artikel Arnold for 3ds Max, Artikel MAXtoA, Artikel Rendering,
[ #SIGGRAPH2016 ]
At SIGGRAPH 2016, Autodesk has announced Arnold for 3ds Max (or MAXtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard 3ds Max interface. Current v0.5 version of MAXtoA is a Preview Release.

>> See Also: Arnold for Maya Guide


Features
  -Integration with 3ds Max shapes, cameras, lights and shaders.
  -Image Based Lighting support, including a state of the art physical sky.
  -3ds Max ActiveShade interactive rendering allows parameter changes to be rapidly previewed without interrupting your work.
  -Support for AOVs & Deep EXR files.
  -Defer the creation of geometry at render time with the Procedural placeholder nodes.
  -Texturable Mesh lights.
  -3rd Party Arnold shader support. * MAXtoA Cloud Rendering for stills and animations. Users can join the optional Autodesk ‘Render Pilot’ program, which now supports MAXtoA.

Pricing

The Arnold for Maya plug-in is provided free-of-charge to customers that buy the Arnold core renderer. Click here for more information on pricing.
Documentation

Whether you are new to Arnold or not, the Arnold for 3ds Max documentation should answer most of your questions. The documentation consists of a User Guide and a Tutorials section, and is available as html or pdf.

Support

You should be able to find the answer to most questions on support.solidangle.com in the documentation or support blog. Customers with a current maintenance and support contract can also email support@solidangle.com.
Requirements & Platforms

  -Compatible with Max 2017
  -Windows 10 and later
  -CPU with at least SSSE3 instructions (2006 and later Intel CPUs, and 2011 and later AMD CPUs)

Downloads


Arnold for Maya is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and for various versions of 3ds Max. Go to the downloads page.
  More Rendering Plugin [post_ad]
[ #SIGGRAPH2016 ]
At SIGGRAPH 2016, Autodesk has announced Arnold for 3ds Max (or MAXtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard 3ds Max interface. Current v0.5 version of MAXtoA is a Preview Release.

>> See Also: Arnold for Maya Guide


Features
  -Integration with 3ds Max shapes, cameras, lights and shaders.
  -Image Based Lighting support, including a state of the art physical sky.
  -3ds Max ActiveShade interactive rendering allows parameter changes to be rapidly previewed without interrupting your work.
  -Support for AOVs & Deep EXR files.
  -Defer the creation of geometry at render time with the Procedural placeholder nodes.
  -Texturable Mesh lights.
  -3rd Party Arnold shader support. * MAXtoA Cloud Rendering for stills and animations. Users can join the optional Autodesk ‘Render Pilot’ program, which now supports MAXtoA.

Pricing

The Arnold for Maya plug-in is provided free-of-charge to customers that buy the Arnold core renderer. Click here for more information on pricing.
Documentation

Whether you are new to Arnold or not, the Arnold for 3ds Max documentation should answer most of your questions. The documentation consists of a User Guide and a Tutorials section, and is available as html or pdf.

Support

You should be able to find the answer to most questions on support.solidangle.com in the documentation or support blog. Customers with a current maintenance and support contract can also email support@solidangle.com.
Requirements & Platforms

  -Compatible with Max 2017
  -Windows 10 and later
  -CPU with at least SSSE3 instructions (2006 and later Intel CPUs, and 2011 and later AMD CPUs)

Downloads


Arnold for Maya is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and for various versions of 3ds Max. Go to the downloads page.
  More Rendering Plugin [post_ad]

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