Hi there,
First of all, sorry for my bad English.
I was looking at the sss in cycles which led me to an article which led me to arnold render. When I looked around for Arnold I found out that it is the go to render engine BUT, I couldn’t find a recent Blender version of it, but I found this: http://rudycortes.com/2011/08/btoa-blender-to-arnold/
It’s very old and I don’t think they are working on it anymore, the github account has nothing to do with btoa (blender to arnold).
And if it would be there, is it worth it. I know that it’s more solid and has more features then cycles but if it comes down to algorithms they’re pretty simular. Do you guys think that Cycles is good enough to come close to arnold or it will ever be? and do you know a blender exporter and if yes, is arnold worth the 1300$ price tag?
If you need a rendering engine that scales very well with many cores and you work with very comples scenes (smoke,hair,huge geometry) then yes Arnold no doubt.
with 1300$ you can get a very good GPU and still have left for a donation with Blender and Cycles if you do medium scenes and can spare a few missing GPU features !
it allways depends on what you want to achieve but for most cases Blender and Cycles will get the job done if you know what you are doing and what the limitations are !
No addon yet, BtoA got squashed a while back for being in conflict with the old NDA. Now the whole Arnold render API is out there for anyone to look at. A few devs I’ve spoken to who are familiar with Arnold mention that integration will be lackluster until the C++ render API in Blender gets some more love and attention. Then there’s always the GPL compatibility to worry about. You might be waiting a while for integration that is anywhere close to what’s available from SItoA and MtoA.