Arnold 6.1 introduces exciting new features and improvements, including new post-processing nodes for creating exposure, color correction, and vignetting effects, as well as support for nested dielectrics for rendering realistic overlapping surfaces such as bubbles or ice cubes in a drink.
Building upon Arnold 6, this update also introduces several USD enhancements and brings even greater speed and flexibility to GPU rendering with improvements to on-demand texture loading and support for light linking, light AOV groups, and more.
New Post-Processing Nodes
New post-processing nodes, or “imagers,” have been added to allow for the chaining of pixel effects before reaching the output driver, letting you perfect your render. New imagers in this release include:
- Exposure: Specify additional exposure compensation.
- Color Correction: Adjust saturation, contrast, gamma, gain, and offset for the whole luminance range, or only for shadows, midtones, or highlights.
- Lens Effects: Apply optical lens effects like vignetting.
- White Balance: Correct your image’s white balance with reference illuminants, custom colors, or a blackbody temperature.
- Tonemap: Artistically modify your image’s tone mapping using a filmic or a modified Reinhard curve.
Nested Dielectrics
We’ve added nested dielectrics, a new priority system for overlapping transparent objects. By allowing you to assign priorities to models, this new feature gives your scenes more physically accurate reflections and refractions of rays. This enables more realistic renders of scenes, such as glass containers with liquid contents and bubbles or ice cubes, as shown in the example below.
GPU Improvements
The GPU renderer can now partially load textures, leading to significant savings in both memory consumption and rendering time. In a typical scene, the amount of memory needed for textures is now up to 5x smaller.
We’ve also added initial support for light linking, support for light AOV groups, improved OSL JIT compilation performance, and more.
USD Enhancements
This release includes added USD support for light shaping, the UsdTransform2d preview shader, and per-face material assignments.
See Also:
- Arnold Is Missing From 3ds Max Or Maya
- How To Improve Render Times With Arnold And Maya