Arnold Arnold
Features

Features

Memory-efficient, scalable ray tracer

Arnold ray tracing rendering software helps artists render complex scenes quickly and easily. Get feature details in the Arnold for Maya, Houdini, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, or Katana user guides.

  • Arnold GPU

    Arnold GPU allows users to switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering. (video: 1:55 min.)

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  • Subsurface scatter

    High-performance ray traced subsurface scattering eliminates the need to tune point clouds.

  • Hair and fur

    Memory-efficient ray traced curve primitives help you create complex fur and hair renders.

  • Motion blur

    3D motion blur interacts with shadows, volumes, indirect lighting, reflection, or refraction. Deformation motion blur and rotational motion are also supported.

  • Volumes

    The volumetric rendering system in Arnold can render effects such as smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow, and fire.

  • Instances

    Arnold can more efficiently ray trace instances of many scene objects with transformation and material overrides.

  • Subdivision and displacement

    Arnold supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces.

  • OSL support

    Arnold now features support for Open Shading Language (OSL), an advanced shading language for Global Illumination renderers.

  • Light Path Expressions

    LPEs give you power and flexibility to create Arbitrary Output Variables to help meet the needs of production.

  • Adaptive sampling

    Adaptive sampling gives users another means of tuning images, allowing them to reduce render times without jeopardizing final image quality.

  • Toon shader

    An advanced Toon shader is part of a non-photorealistic solution provided in combination with the Contour Filter.

  • Denoising

    Two denoising solutions in Arnold offer flexibility by letting designers use much lower-quality sampling settings.

  • Flexible and extensible API

    Integrate Arnold in external applications and create custom shaders, cameras, light filters, and output drivers.

  • Stand-alone command-line renderer

    Arnold has a native scene description format stored in human-readable text files. Easily edit, read, and write these files via the C/Python API.

  • Standard Surface shader

    This energy-saving, physically based uber shader helps produce a wide range of materials and looks.

  • Standard Hair shader

    This physically based shader is built to render hair and fur, based on the d'Eon and Zinke models for specular and diffuse shading.

  • Alembic procedural

    A native Alembic procedural lets users render Alembic files directly without any translation.

  • Profiling API and structured statistics

    An extensive set of tools lets users more easily identify performance issues and optimize rendering processes.

  • Material assignments and overrides

    Operators make it possible to override any part of a scene at render time and enable support for open standard frameworks such as MaterialX.

  • Built-in Cryptomatte

    Create ID mattes automatically with support for motion blur, transparency, and depth of field.

See full release notes