Prepare to elevate your rendering game with the highly anticipated release of Arnold 7.3.1, which hit the scene on March 28, 2024. This feature-packed update introduces a wealth of enhancements and groundbreaking new capabilities, poised to revolutionize your rendering workflow. Let's dive into the exciting details and explore how this cutting-edge version can supercharge your creative pursuits.
New Features and Enhancements
Dithered Sampling
Image from Autodesk
In progressive and adaptive rendering, Arnold 7.3.1 introduces support for dithered sampling, which improves noise distribution at low sample counts.
Extended MaterialX Support
Rendering node graphs that combine Arnold nodes with MaterialX standard library nodes is now feasible as a result of expanded support for the MaterialX format for rich material and look dev data.
Improved Denoising
Image from Autodesk
With the OptiX and OIDN denoisers, Arnold 7.3.1 enhances denoising. Now that the NVIDIA OptiX denoiser can operate on low-resolution progressive render passes, early scene previews with significantly less noise are produced. With its "10% better performance" on CPU, the Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN) denoiser now offers customers the option to run it on CPU, GPU, or automatically.
GPU Rendering
Image from Autodesk
OptiX 8, the latest iteration of NVIDIA's GPU ray tracing architecture, has been utilized to rewrite a significant portion of the GPU renderer. Numerous improvements in rendering performance and startup times are brought about by this update, including much faster render times overall, reduced GPU memory utilization, better scaling on multiple GPUs, and shorter startup times.
Overlay Imager
Image from Autodesk
An Overlay imager for text layering onto rendered images is one of the new features.
Global Light Sampling in Volumes
Image from Autodesk
Support for global light sampling in volumes.
Toon Light-Group AOVs
Image from Autodesk
Support for toon light-group AOVs.
Conclusion
A lot of changes have been made to the user experience in Arnold 7.3.1, including a significantly better GPU renderer, quicker volume rendering, high-quality curves, light AOVs in the toon shader, a text overlay imager, and many more. Regardless of your experience level, Arnold 7.3.1 is made to assist you in producing beautiful, high-caliber renderings.
As a leading cloud rendering service provider and render farm, Fox Renderfarm also supports Arnold rendering. Fox Renderfarm is now offering a free $25 trial to all new registrants, so let's start rendering!
Source: Autodesk Inc.
