Release Date

January 08 2014

This version uses Arnold 4.1.3.3

HIGHLIGHTED NEW FEATURES

  • Faster: physical sky, multi-layered SSS, .ass loading, Perlin noise, light sampling and many-light scenes, bump3d and gobo shader.
  • Reduced memory overhead in several fronts (polymesh data, per-object, per-thread and per-pixel overhead).
  • Automatic UI generation for shaders in a .so/.dll. You can now use your favorite third party shaders without having to mess with .sdpl files.
  • Ability to add user-data to geometric shapes, which can later be queried by shaders at render time.
  • Texture support in mesh_light.
  • Smoother, curved rotational motion blur.
  • Improved performance in SITOA_Viewer.
  • New, faster skin shader with a simplified workflow.
  • Deep EXR support.
  • Custom EXR metadata.
  • Improved the photometric light UI.

NOTES

  • The UI of the shaders of existing scenes will render without a proper layout due to the new automatic UI generation for shaders.
  • The skin_sss shader is considered legacy and will be removed in the future.
  • Enable AOV composition is now always on. RGB and RGBA AOVs support opacity composition.
  • The ability to export native hair as a .bin file has been discontinued since the .ass binary data mode is good enough.

INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES

  • The Motion Blur controls have been simplified and unified across the different plugins. This might change the look of older scenes.
  • Reversed U axis of latlong and angular environment mappings. This change affects the sky, skydome_light and the sta_environment shader.
  • Pointcloud SSS has been removed, including all the old parameters. SSS is now computed exclusively with the ray traced SSS engine, which has a single quality control (BSSRDF samples). This leads to warnings when loading old scenes, and possibly a different look and/or noise level.
  • The stretched_phong BRDF has been removed.
  • sta_volume_collector has been renamed to "volume_collector", and adopted the common shader's code. Therefore old existing scenes that use this shader will break.
  • The name of the SITOA_DestroyScene command has changed from "Arnold Scene Destroyer" to "SITOA_DestroyScene". If you have a keyboard mapping for "Arnold Scene Destroyer", you'll have to clear that mapping and then assign the key to "SITOA_DestroyScene".
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