Arnold for Blender, first working version

Announcement
Github-page

Arnold is a high-end renderer that has become the industry standard for vfx-work in recent years. Unlike vray for blender it looks like this won’t be a seperate build . I have only used Arnold a few times but it is an quite an excellent renderer that gives you great results.

is this an official plugin from solid angle for integrating arnold?

Wow… V-Ray, Renderman and now Arnold? That’s great! It doesn’t seem like an official plugin, but as long as it works well I’m ok with that :smiley:

I think it’s not an official plugin.

This is very unstable and will not work most of the time. the arnold version it is compatable with is 3-4 years old. still learning Arnold, so updates will come.

But it’s interresting, I love Arnold !

It might be thanks to our “inside man” Brecht :slight_smile: or at least Blender is on their radar after they hired him at SolidAngle.

Queue the “But Arnold is so sloooow due to no GPUUUU”-crowd, lol…

This is great news!

a bug, I think so


  File "E:\Blender 2.76\2.76\scripts\addons\BtoA\Lights.py", line 16, in <module>
    from .lights import diskLight
  File "E:\Blender 2.76\2.76\scripts\addons\BtoA\lights\diskLight.py", line 5, in <module>
    from ..AiTypes import *
ImportError: No module named 'BtoA.AiTypes'

  1. I am testing MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016 on windows 7 b4 bits

  2. I have run


2to3 -w R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\scripts\arnold
[\code]

and copy [arnold] directory to "E:\Blender 2.76\2.76\scripts\addons"

3. I have download your BtoA from git and decompressed into "E:\Blender 2.76\2.76\scripts\addons"
And change the name to BtoA from "BtoA-master"

4. I ahve edit 2.76\scripts\addons\arnold\arnold_common.py to 

ai_name = {
‘windows’: r’R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\bin\ai.dll’,
‘linux’ : ‘libai.so’,
‘darwin’ : ‘libai.dylib’



5. the above msg appears when I try to enable BtoA in blender

Definitely not the “first” BtoA implementation out there, but certainly the first public one worthy of note in a long time. Sadly there are some very comprehensive BtoA links that will likely never see the (public) light of day, but this is a good start!

Nah, this is a fork of Rudy Cortes’s old exporter, updated (somewhat) for 2.76. And Twitter-stalking the dev ;), looks like he works at Animal Logic and not at SolidAngle. But, as Oyster pointed out, it has registration errors. I actually spent a bit a few months ago looking at this fork, learning my way around the Arnold Python API, so I thought I could figure this error out quickly and get it to register correctly. No dice; and the API is a little byzantine until you get familiar with it.

thanks hyperbolero for posting this on here before i had the chance to do so.

Ill point out that currently im developing on OSX blender 2.75b master, using Arnold 4.2.7.3 which is in MtoA 1.2.3.0 or HtoA 1.5.2…
yes i know about 8 months old, but i dont want to deal with the headache of any API changes just yet.

This isnt official, however solidangle did retweet it. :slight_smile:
I started with Rudy Cortes GitHub and changed it so it would run in current python version, and current blender. im still updating it to current Arnold Core.
Rudy had Geo export, Rendering and basic materials already done, i had to change some stuff with the world space export to get it working correctly. but Rudy has done a great job with the core code.

two mistakes in your installation.

  1. you need to copy the arnold directory to the blender modules path, not the addons path. have a look at the image below to see how it should look. Note that i have a separate directory set in the blender prefs for the Scripts path.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]423033[/ATTACH]

  1. you have changed just the name of the file Arnold is looking for the DLL. change line 25 (this might be different depending on version of Arnold, and OS)

libai = ctypes.CDLL(‘R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\bin\ai.dll’)

Ive updated the installation instructions to make it clearer.

Nope, not the first ever… but the first time I have got it working :slight_smile:

You need to improve your stalking skills :slight_smile: Previously worked at Animal Logic, Rising Sun and Iloura. but currently on holidays. This has not been developed at any of the companies I’ve previously worked for, its entirely a personal project.

Wouaw thank you for this great personnal project Levon !
I’m curious about Arnold and will wait to see the result :slight_smile:
Seb

Yes well done and we all hopet for a great succes of this project ^^

@levon
thank you for your answering. But I think what you said is not right.

  1. what you write

libai = ctypes.CDLL('R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\bin\ai.dll')

has the almost same effect as what I have modified. But to be exactly, my modification does not change the code too much, so you can still use it on windows/linux/darwin

  1. you can not find the definiation of AiTypes( then ai_FLOAT) in any python source files no matter under diretory “BtoA”, "“R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\scripts\pykick”, “R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\scripts\arnold” or “R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\scripts\mtoa”. This cause the problem. You can verify this by searching the content of *.py

  2. as for the directory seperator, raw string, “\” or “/” should be used
    so ‘R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\bin\ai.dll’ is wrong. it must be any of the following expressions:


r'R:\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\bin\ai.dll'
'R:\\MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016\\bin\\ai.dll'
'R:/MtoA-1.2.6.1-2016/bin/ai.dll'

I have found Rudy Cortes’s old exporter at https://github.com/fxjeane/BtoA
and try to use the new exporter by comment out DiskLight lines in Lights.py, delete lights\diskLight.py
now I think we’d better give hyperbolero more time in developing this addon
Just my 2 cents. Regards

Haha, I must admit I’m not a very good stalker. I suppose that’s a good thing, though :smiley: Right, I figured this was a personal project unrelated to any particular studio’s production environment. Any thoughts on the registration errors in the latest commits? Previous commits didn’t have any problem registering for me.

I believe hyperbolero only posted this as an announcement. levon is the one developing the addon.

my mistake, i accidentally commited a WIP test. still getting a hang of GIT development. ive removed Disklight.py and it should be working now

  1. im on OSX so i use ‘/’ i think what you posted is correct for Windows.

I removed Arnold, then this addon prevents my blender from launching because it cannot file ai.dll.
I think the better way is to tell the user what is missing but not no make blender error!

I’ve made some decent headway on my own Arnold integration (that I unfortunately can’t share yet…). If you have any questions about the API I may be able to help, and if I can’t I can certainly get you in touch with someone who can.

All the loading of ai.dll is handled by Arnold’s python files… As i cant redistribute these files modified i cant do anything about this.