Version 7.3.2.0 of Arnold, the industry-standard renderer, has just been released and is a major update. Tone mapping in toon, better volume denoising, support for global light sampling, increased OSL compatibility, and an update to OpenVDB 11 are just a few of the new innovations included in this release.
1. Toon Tone-Mapping Enhancement
Image from Autodesk
Arnold presents a fascinating update to the toon tone-mapping feature in this edition. The fine-tuning possibilities available within the toon shader will be appreciated by artists working on styled animations or comic-style renderings. In particular, tone-mapping's color and saturation can be adjusted, giving you greater artistic freedom and enabling toon shading to be seamlessly included in your creations.
2. Better Volume Denoising
Image from Autodesk
In Arnold 7.3.2.0, denoising volumes now yield better results. The denoiser retains more features thanks to modifications in the computation of volume albedo. Furthermore, there are fewer ringing effects when objects are seen against a background. Some of the denoising artifacts seen in low-AA renders have also been addressed with a new N_denoise AOV.
3. Many-Lights Support for Light Linking
Currently, each set of lights connected to a shape receives a single global light sample. For scenes with light linkage, this improvement can greatly increase rendering performance. Using Global Light Sampling, for instance, results in twice as fast rendering of the ALab scene.
4. Improved Standard Hair Rendering on GPU
Image from Autodesk
The extra_depth argument is now supported by the GPU renderer. This allows blonde or brightly colored hair to be accurately rendered without increasing the GI_specular_depth.
5. Improved Volume Albedo AOV
Image from Autodesk
Volume denoising is improved by the more physically-based volume albedo values. For compositing, any LPE AOV that uses volume albedo is also more beneficial. You can set the new global option legacy_volume_albedo to true to enable backward compatibility.
6. Baking Subdivided and Displaced Geometry with Kick
Render-time subdivision and displacement can be used to bake polygon mesh geometry, and kick -bakegeo -resave can be used to save the geometry to a file.
Source: Autodesk Inc.
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