What is Arnold?

Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures. Arnold was the primary renderer on dozens of films from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity. It is available as a standalone renderer on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, with plug-ins for Maya, Softimage, Houdini,Cinema 4D and Katana.

Photorealistic

"Arnold gives us outstanding image quality and the ease of set up that today’s productions demand. I’m thrilled we are able to add it to the arsenal of tools at ILM."

John Knoll, ILM

Easy to Use

"Everything about Arnold is easier – whether it’s the straight-forward controls for the artist or the clean consistent API for the developer."

Chad Dombrova, Luma Pictures

Memory Efficient

"The software is robust and can reliably function with extra-ordinarily large data sets."

Dave Levy, The Mill

Easy to Switch

"Arnold has been a revelation both in the minimal time required for us to port all our pipeline to support it, and in the ease by which our lighters have switched to using it."

Martin Preston, Framestore

Arnold for Maya (or MtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Maya interface.

Features

• Seamless integration with Maya shapes, cameras, lights and shaders.
• Image Based Lighting support, including a state of the art physical sky.
• Interactive rendering (IPR) allows parameter changes to be rapidly previewed without interrupting your work.
• Support for volume rendering with Maya Fluids.
• Support for Maya Hair and nHair.
• Particles and nParticles support, including particle instancer.
• Defer the creation of geometry at render time with the Stand-in placeholder nodes.
• Productivity boost: override sets, holdout mattes, shadow catcher, passes, UDIM style textures, and arbitrary primvar data.
• Extensible through plug-ins (Golaem, FumeFX for Maya, Yeti, Shave & Haircut).
• XGen integration.
• Texturable geometric lights.
• Deep EXR.
• Rendering of curves.

Requirements & Platforms

• Compatible with Maya 2013, 2013.5, 2014 and 2015
• Windows 7 and later
• Linux RHEL6 equivalent (glibc 2.12) and later
• Mac OS X 10.8 and later
• CPU with at least SSSE3 instructions (2006 and later Intel CPUs, and 2011 and later AMD CPUs)