New Arnold 7.0 render update from Autodesk

What's new in Arnold 7.0

Autodesk's Arnold ray-traced 3D rendering system has received a massive update - Arnold 7.0. The new version adds Intel Open Image Denoise Technology, which improves the quality of noise reduction in general, important improvements in GPU scalability, as well as improved performance and interactivity. Important API changes have also been made, such as the ability to render multiple scenes in the same process, and shaders now support multiple outputs.

New features:

Open Image Denoise imager: Intel's Open Image Denoise is a fast AI-accelerated denoiser that runs on the processor and is integrated into Arnold as imager_denoiser_oidn imager as an additional denoiser option.

Better AI Noise Reduction: OptiX and OIDN denoisers now use the newly introduced noise_albedo_noisy AOV parameter as the albedo AOV function provided to the denoiser. This adds specular reflections and refractions to the albedo, which can improve the quality of the denoiser.

imager_tonemap now supports LUT mode to apply LUT files in all formats supported by OCIOv2 (cube, look, 3dl, clf among others).

Imager_color_curves: A new imager has been added to control brightness and color curves. Individual curves can be created for each R, G, or B component, as well as a master curve to control the overall brightness performance.

Visible lights are now transparent:Visible lights are now transparent, matching the behavior of indirectly visible lights. It also makes it possible to mask out the black parts of textured light sources.

Matte color support: Added matte color support to the GPU Integrator. This means matte close, matte shader and matte shape flag are now supported.

Reduced VRAM usage for GPU volumes: Compression of NanoVDB volumes has been improved in version 7.0, so we see roughly a further 50-60% reduction in GPU memory in typical volumetric scenes. GPU volumes now consume less VRAM than equivalent CPU volumes consume RAM.

Arnold 7.0 system requirements

Arnold works well on most 64-bit systems.

Minimum OS requirements:

• OSX 10.11 or later
• Windows 7 or later with Visual Studio 2015 Redistributable Package
• Linux with at least glibc 2.12 and libstdc++ 3.4.13 (gcc 4.4.7). This is the RHEL/CentOS 6 equivalent
• CPUs must support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
• Optix™ Denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 or higher.
• The Arnold GPU runs on Linux and Windows and requires an NVIDIA GPU with Turing, Volt, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture.

Arnold 7.0 cost

As of today, Arnold's annual subscription price is $360 and Arnold's monthly subscription price is $45. The price of a 3-year Arnold subscription is $970.