Arnold Render - Public release

Hi,
I just saw this on Twitter: https://www.solidangle.com/
Lot of information about Arnold, even a demo version is available it seems.

Congratulations Solid Angle! :slight_smile:

Would be nice to get a Blender exporter for this.

Awesome, congratulations to Solid angle! :smiley:

I would definitely enjoy seeing a Blender plugin for Arnold as well.

I can easily see Chaos Group enduring a sudden drop in its customer base already, the king of raytracers is now publicly available for purchase and is one of those engines that is actually worthy of a four-digit price tag.

On top of that, whatā€™s great about Solid Angle is that they actually choose to share some of their secrets with other developers (the SSS in Cycles for instance is based on their algorithms).

This could actually prove to be a serious disruption in the current render engine market, what with it already taking marketshare from Mental-Ray and Renderman even before this announcement.

Iā€™ve always agreed that Arnold is like Cyclesā€™s big brother. Very similar in itā€™s approach to rendering, just more robust and fully featured. Itā€™s a wonderful renderer for Cycles to look up to. :slight_smile:

And where Cycles hopes to go eventually, we just donā€™t expect it to get there real quickly as long as itā€™s just a few developers contributing (even if it is true that Cycles has more contributors nowadays than it used to).

Good things will come to Cycles in 2.7x, we just need to wait.

As for my opinion on using Arnold or not, I can technically afford the licensing cost, but Iā€™m wary of making purchases that big unless the need for it is absolutely critical (since Cycles can take care of my needs at the moment, especially now with volumetrics in).

Thatā€™s great news, although it was about timeā€¦:yes:
And the pricing isnā€™t bad!

Personally i realy like Arnold, itā€™s great tool, I use it in work whenever iā€™m allowed toā€¦
But Cycles, even with shortest feature list and probably lower speed, feels more intuitiveā€¦ with rendering in viewport, directly seeing changes in materials and geometry and gpu renderingā€¦ Maybe its the little brother but i like him more :evilgrin:

Thatā€™s something that canā€™t be said for sure right now, you see the Arnold Engine currently does not have a comprehensive plugin for Blender, Iā€™m sure that a lot of the things you said Cycles has can also be had for Arnold with a complete integration like there is already with 3DS Max and Maya.

Not that this eliminates any interest I have in seeing Cycles develop more, if Cycles can match Arnold feature-for-feature, then it would be a revolution for doing work inside of the Blender application (not to mention one being able to achieve true movie-like quality without any financial barriers).

WOW Iā€™ve been waiting a long time for this :smiley: Downloading the trial now. Thanks for the tip!

I donā€™t see any standalone applications, only the plugins for Softimage and Maya. So - for the time being anyway - a Blender exporter is a pipe dream (?). :wink: As much as I dislike Maya, Iā€™m still excited to test it out with Maya 2014.

Edit: I could very well be wrong about that, actuallyā€¦ I may have no idea what Iā€™m talking about.

Kick.exe is the standalone for Arnold. No GUI, and you really need a .ass file for scene description created by either SItoA or MtoA for it to be worthwhile anyway. HOWEVER the entire API is documented, so anyone who wanted to make a Blender exporter could. It would just suffer from the same CRAZY LONG export times as other commercial render engines due to the need to export via python to avoid the issues that come with GPL compatibility.

EDIT: WOW just took a look at the new pricing. Thatā€™s amazingly low, wayyy lower than what I had been expecting. And not even node-locked! Congrats to Marcos et al. for this milestone!

Yeah, I waited with bated breath when I clicked on the pricing link, but I sighed in relief :slight_smile: But the pricing is per license though, right? And at the moment (or am I reading it wrong?) they only sell 5+ licenses at a time? Individual artists canā€™t buy a single license yet, right?

Somehow, itā€™s actually faster than I thought it would be. A random 900 X 800 image with SSS was noise free in 1:02-ish. Sheesh.

Well, another thing about the engine (not about the technology), I am personally quite leery about even thinking of trying an engine that gives the file extension name the same word as whatā€™s considered mild profanity.

I sure hope thereā€™s not any other verbally suggestive terminology sneaking around the areas of the engine visible to the users, or I would simply refuse to use it on moral grounds no matter how good it gets.

You, the FCC, and the Christian Mothers Union should find consolation in the fact that ā€œassā€ is a perfectly fine word to refer to a donkey. Sometimes, you just have to give them a kick to get them going! (Which might be an animal welfare concern, however)

But the fact that the .exe name is ā€˜Kickā€™ then means the suggestion that Solid Angle considers the Arnold engine a donkey (which from looking at the feature set is far above that level).

Whatā€™s wrong with just calling them .arnold files (perhaps .awesome files then if they wanted to convey power), Ton decided at one point to take two letters off of ā€˜Blenderā€™ for the file name and no one has ever complained.

Youā€™re underestimating the versatility of donkeys, which are very intelligent beings.

Whatā€™s wrong with just calling them .arnold files (perhaps .awesome files then if they wanted to convey power), Ton decided at one point to take two letters off of ā€˜Blenderā€™ for the file name and no one has ever complained.

Not using the three-letter convention can cause problems with a few old or badly-written programs. Should you meet Marcos (or whoever else is responsible) back in the distant past when he made that decision, make sure to mention your concerns to him.

Pretty cool, although without a blender plugin, without max or maya skills, and without paying CG workā€¦ I canā€™t justify the costā€¦ but, maybe someday! Thatā€™s a good price for such serious software.

The program is Kick and the files are .ass. Pretty clever/funny if you ask me, and definitely not worth getting bent out of shape over.

At the command line you type kick xxxxx.ass ā€¦ :evilgrin:

The pricing is steep for a hobbiest but more than reasonable for any professional use.

The blockbuster movie: gravity, was rendered with Arnold it seemsā€¦

In the render crunch they had about 15000 cores working on the show, and about 600 Terabytes of disk space serving all of that!

WOW

I donā€™t appreciate their choice of terminology either, but why do you insist on derailing every thread about render engines with your objections? All youā€™re accomplishing is the launching of a flame war. Instead of posting here, write Solid Angle an email about your objections. Of course, since you would never buy the software anyway, ethical objection or not, Iā€™m not sure how much weight itā€™ll carry.

Anyway, who knows which came first: the decision to call the files that, or the fact that it stands for ā€œArnold Scene Sourceā€? Based on experience with human beings, Iā€™d assume the former, but who knows.

Can you guys blame them though? I meanā€¦Arnold is named after Arnold Schwarzeneggerafter all, and the naming of kick.ass is quite funny when you consider who its named after.