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

  1. Download Arnold for 3ds Max.
  2. Follow the installation instructions.

System Requirements

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).


  • Noice denoiser imager: The Arnold Noice denoiser is now also available as a post-processing effect. You can automatically denoise images every time you render a scene, edit the denoising settings and see the resulting image directly in the render view. Note that imager_denoiser_noice does not support temporal denoising (core#9718).
  • OptiX denoiser imager: The OptiX™ denoiser is now available as a post-processing effect. The imager also exposes additional controls for clamping and blending the result. (core#9719).


  • 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 connecting base_color to a texture is such a common use case that it's better to swap the two defaults and avoid having to adjust base 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

  • Shadow groups: Support for shadow groups has been added (core#9898).
  • Improved start-up times: This version improves the initial startup time when rendering a scene for the first time. On some scenes, we measured up to a 2x speedup in startup time, as well as a 4% speedup in render time (core#10160). 
  • Report GPU memory used when there is a GPU crash: Running out of GPU memory is a common problem and can sometimes result in random error messages. We now report the amount of GPU memory that Arnold had available when it first started, which if low could indicate that other applications were using GPU resources and stopping those applications will allow Arnold to succeed, and also report the amount of memory available when the GPU crash occurred, which if low is highly suggestive of an out of memory condition. (core#10261).

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.

  • core#10074 Blackbody: bad XYZ color normalization.
  • core#9982 Clamp negative values with thin_film and transmission.
  • core#10233 clip_geo: stops working if you tumble the camera in IPR.
  • core#9744 Crash due to out-of-memory when rendering.
  • core#10222 [GPU] Fix Arnold not being able to recover from recoverable exceptions.
  • core#10208 [GPU] Remove usage of scientific notation for log progress.
  • core#10175 Mix of two standard_surfaces with transmission hangs the render.
  • core#10149 Points should be visible in the viewport API in polygon mode.
  • core#10091 quad_light can produce rare black samples.
  • core#10283 Remove MacOS xcrun installation prompt when crash occurs.
  • core#10259 Report error code when NVML fails to initialize.
  • usd#592 Invalid face-varying primvars crash the render delegate.
  • usd#596 Invalid USD is produced if polymesh is made of triangles and nsides is empty.
  • usd#481 std::string, TfToken, and SdfAssetPath typed VtArrays are not converted when setting primvars.
  • usd#619 Several built-in render buffer types are not translated to the right Arnold AOV type.
  • usd#634 Fixing disappearing meshes when playing back animation.
  • usd#621 UVs not read from facevarying primvar if indexes are not present.
  • usd#638 Motion start and motion end is not set reading animated transformation.


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