MAXtoA 4.3.0 introduces Arnold 6.2.0.0 and is a feature release bringing light mixing, bloom, and interactive denoising through imagers, and embedding imagers inside the Arnold RenderView.
Installation
- Download Arnold for 3ds Max.
- Follow the installation instructions.
System Requirements
- Autodesk 3ds Max 2019, 2020, or 2021.
- Windows 7 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
- CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
- GPU rendering requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 461.40 (Quadro), 461.40 (GeForce), or higher drivers. See Getting Started with Arnold GPU for more information.
- Optix™ denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.
Enhancements
Imagers:
Light Mixer imager: This new imager makes it possible to interactively edit the contribution of light group AOVs during and after rendering without restarting the render (core#9838). Bloom in imager_lens_effect: The imager_lens_effect now implements a bloom effect. Bloom or glow is a post-processing effect that will blur pixels above a given threshold across the frame to simulate light bleeding on an imperfect lens. See the (core#9728).
- OpenColorIO v2 support: Arnold now uses an updated version of OCIO and is able to load and run OpenColorIO v2 configurations. It is fully backward compatible and will load and run existing configurations as before.(core#7827)
- Up to 256 light AOVs supported: The number of supported light AOVs is now 256, it was 15 previously (core#7802).
- Faster cell_noise: The cell_noise shader is now about 2.5x faster on CPU and 4.3x faster on GPU. In order to achieve this, we had to make a look-breaking change that manifests as a different random seed (core#9866).
- New default values for Standard Surface: The base and base_color parameters on standard_surface are now respectively set to 1.0, and (0.8, 0.8, 0.8) by default. Changing
base
to 1 after connectingbase_color
to a texture is such a common use case that it's better to swap the two defaults and avoid having to adjustbase
every time (core#9128 standardsurface#15) - Improved progressive sampling: faster and higher-quality sampling improves progressive and adaptive rendering performance (core#10023).
- Constant color detection in maketx: Added constant color detection to maketx. maketx/AiMakeTx will by default add the
--monochrome-detect
flag (core#10179). - OpenEXR maketx passthrough: OpenEXR file inputs to maketx/AiMakeTx will now by default generate an OpenEXR based .tx files instead of TIFF based .tx files.
--format tif
or specifying a non-tx extension in the output filename will still allow for using other filetypes (core#6792). - maketx allows by default half TIFFs: maketx/AiMakeTx will now by default allow creating TIFF based .tx files with half floats. Before, passing
-d half
would by default produce a 32-bit float TIFF .tx file. Beware that most tools do not support half TIFF, so float TIFF or half OpenEXR should be used when the .tx file needs to be used outside of Arnold (core#6792). - Faster maketx half TIFF generation: Generating half TIFF .tx files should be several times faster on certain Linux machines (core#10224).
- Support for OSL shader metadata: Metadata from OSL shaders are now visible on Arnold nodes and can be read via the AiMetadata APIs (core#6718).
Limit number of per-light log messages: If there are more than 100 lights, we stop outputting per-light sampling log messages at the regular log verbosity and instead only output these at debug level verbosity. This should help avoid "spamming" the logs when there are many lights in a scene (core#10098).
- Faster Autodesk Analytics Program: ADPClientService should upload data more quickly and consume fewer CPU resources, especially when there is no internet access (core#9776).
- Updated single-user licensing: Autodesk Desktop Licensing has been updated to version 11.0.0.4854. This version is not compatible with previous Arnold versions and should be installed automatically from plugin installers if single-user licensing is used, or can be updated manually from the Arnold License Manager. It is required only for single-user licensing, network licensing (AdskFlex) and RLM are not affected (core#289).
- More accurate crash report: When crashes occur while Arnold is running, a stacktrace is printed out. The stacktrace report should now be more reliable and slightly easier to understand (core#9156).
- More profile blocks added: Most of the Arnold API now has associated profiling blocks so it is easier to determine which Arnold components are consuming the most render time (core#10272).
- Interactive imagers in kick: kick now displays imagers in interactive mode (core#9836).
- Faster Apple M1 performance: Arnold should now be able to properly use both the big and small M1 cores (still under Rosetta2) (core#10062).
- OpenVDB 7.1: Arnold now uses OpenVDB 7.1. More information about the changes between OpenVDB 4 and 7.1 can be found here. (core#9861)
Embed imagers in ARV. Imagers can now be applied, removed, re-ordered, edited, directly in a dedicated tab of the Arnold RenderView (maxtoa#904).
Imagers: expose the layer_selection string (maxtoa#935)
Remove the optix denoiser flags from the rendering options and AOVs. The denoiser is now available as an imager (maxtoa#918)
New Compatibility Mode replacing the Legacy Map support flag (maxtoa#866)
"Auto Convert TX" should imply "Use Existing TX" OFF (maxtoa#930)
The Arnold RenderView snapshot pane needs resize handles (maxtoa#785)
GPU Enhancements
Bug Fixes
The Arnold RenderView doesn't show the rendering in progress until the UI is moved (maxtoa#913)
The light group manager does not initialize correctly (maxtoa#915)
TX files fail to generate if textures are in an OSL Bitmap Lookup map (maxtoa#923)
3ds Max Materials fail to render in SME when .ass/.usd export is ON (maxtoa#967)
Crash on rendering with an empty path for USD/ASS (maxtoa#945)
Crash on exporting to USD with more than one light (maxtoa#1030)
core#10278 100% progress is not always printed.