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.

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.

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".