Key features of Autodesk Arnold
From furry creatures to wondrous landscapes, the robust Arnold toolset helps artists render professional-grade 3D characters and complex scenes with ease.
Arnold GPU
Switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering.
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.
Volumes
Render effects such as smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow and fire with volumetric rendering.
Instances
Efficiently ray trace instances of many scene objects with transformation and material overrides.
Subdivision and displacement
Create smooth, curved surfaces with support for Catmull-Clark subdivision.
Open Shading Language (OSL) support
Use Open Shading Language (OSL), an advanced shading language for Global Illumination renderers.
Light Path Expressions
Get power and flexibility to create Arbitrary Output Variables with Light Path Expressions (LPEs) to help meet the needs of production.
Adaptive sampling
Use another means of tuning images to reduce render times without jeopardising final image quality.
Toon shader
In combination with the Contour Filter, an advanced toon shader provides a non-photorealistic solution.
Denoising
Powerful denoising solutions offer you the flexibility to use much lower-quality sampling settings.
Features of Autodesk Arnold
Flexible and extensible API
Integrate Arnold into external applications and create custom shaders, cameras, light filters and output drivers.
Universal Scene Description (USD) support
Maximise the power of USD with Arnold in production scenarios.
Imagers
Use Bloom, Light Mixer, Noice and OptiX denoiser imagers to control lighting effects and automatically denoise after each render.
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
Produce a wide range of materials and looks with this energy-saving, physically-based uber shader.
Standard Hair shader
Render hair and fur with this physically based shader, based on the D’Eon and Zinke models for specular and diffuse shading.
Alembic procedural
Render Alembic files directly without any translation using a native procedural.
Profiling API and structured statistics
Identify performance issues and optimise rendering processes more easily with an extensive set of tools.
Material assignments and overrides
With operators, 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.
Integrated OpenColorIO
Take advantage of OpenColorIO for state-of-the-art colour management.