ARNOLD RENDER SOLIDANGLE


EASIER BETTER FASTER



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.


Autodesk has acquired Solid Angle, developer of the Arnold renderer. Solid Angle founder and chief software architect Marcos Fajardo will join Autodesk along with the rest of the company’s staff.

Financial terms of the deal, which was announced at the start of NAB 2016, were not disclosed.

Arnold: the renderer that rewrote the rules of an industry A fast, efficient Monte Carlo raytracer, Arnold has shaken up the way the visual effects industry works.

First used in production at Sony Pictures Imageworks, where Fajardo worked until 2010, it quickly became taken up by other large VFX houses on the strength of its ability to handle complex scenes.

As well as conquering much of the high end of the market within a little over five years, Arnold helped establish raytracing as a viable rendering methodology for visual effects.

Instead of relying on traditional methods like those permitted by RenderMan’s original Reyes architecture – put crudely, less computationally intensive, but less realistic – studios rapidly switched to raytracing.

The software is now used by over 500 studios worldwide, on projects ranging from Oscar-winning movies like Ex Machina and Gravity to TV series like Game of Thrones, and numerous ads and cinematics.

It is now so ubiquitous that it’s sometimes hard to believe for how little time Arnold has been publicly available: Solid Angle only started listing prices for the software on its website in 2014.




ARNOLD RENDER 2.0.1 & Maya 2017

PHOTOREALISM EASIER BETTER FASTER




The near future: no change in price or licence terms

That’s the history, or a potted version of it. So what will change in future, now that Autodesk owns Arnold?

In the short term, not very much: Autodesk has confirmed that there will be no changes in pricing, and that all existing product support contracts remain in place.

The company has also confirmed that it will not be discontinuing perpetual licences for Arnold, despite having just moved to a rental-only model for all of its other software products.

When we asked, Autodesk told us that the business models of the two sets of products were “very different”.

On pressing a bit harder, we were told that one of those differences was that “customers of Side Effects don’t necessarily want to move to subscription”.

ARNOLD RENDER vs Mental Ray



Mental ray render is not realistic




Solidangle Arnold render is realistic so is the winner