Autodesk has released Arnold 7.2.4, the latest version of the production renderer.
The update enhances internal edge detection in the toon shader and improves rendering performance in scenes with multiple mesh lights, while also expanding OpenColorIO and MaterialX support.
Improvements to Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Mesh Light Sampling
Compared to previous iterations of Arnold, Arnold 7.2.4 is a relatively minor update, described in the documentation as a feature enhancement.
The toon shader now features enhanced detection of internal edges. This ensures outlines that might have been missed previously are rendered correctly, as illustrated in the image (if present).
Performance improvements include better sampling of mesh lights; render times on scenes with multiple mesh lights have been reduced by up to 5%.
Interactive rendering has also been improved, although the release notes don’t specify the extent of the performance boost.
Additional changes include support for OCIO color space aliases in the OCIO color manager and the removal of restrictions on node naming conventions in custom MaterialX node definitions.
Support in the Integration Plugins
All of Arnold’s integration plugins have been updated to support the new features:
- 3ds Max: MAXtoA 5.6.5
- Cinema 4D: C4DtoA 4.6.6
- Houdini: HtoA 6.2.4.0
- Katana: KtoA 4.2.4.0
- Maya: MtoA 5.3.4
System Requirements and Availability
Arnold 7.2.4 is available for Windows 10+, RHEL/CentOS 7+ Linux, and macOS 10.13+. Integrations are offered for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Katana, and Maya.
GPU rendering is supported only on Windows and Linux, and requires a compatible Nvidia GPU.
