Autodesk has officially launched Arnold 7.2.1, a new and improved version of their ray-tracing production renderer. Featuring dozens of new features and bug fixes, the release comes with an impressive new distance shader, faster and simpler light sampling, higher-quality triangle intersection, and better USD support.
The highlight of the update, however, is the newly-added distance shader, which utilizes sample rays to estimate the distance from the shading point to the nearest surface and then maps this distance to a color linear gradient, enabling the user to set up gorgeous effects.
Another new feature introduced by Arnold 7.2.1 is global light sampling, a new and more efficient sampling technique for lights. According to Autodesk, when enabled, the light sample settings on individual lights are ignored and the overall global contribution of all lights together is computed using “options.light_samples” number of samples only, allowing one to render scenes with multiple lights much faster.
Furthermore, the release brings several enhancements to the USD pipeline, adding support for more MaterialX shaders in USD, enabling Arnold to support MaterialX Standard Library shaders for creating and manipulating BSDFs, VDFs, and EDFs. What’s more, geometric primitives, such as cube, sphere, cylinder, and capsule, are now converted to Hydra meshes instead of Arnold primitives.
Overall, Arnold 7.2.1 offers more powerful and efficient tools for production-quality rendering, and with Autodesk’s ongoing investment, it enables users to achieve better results and streamline their workflows.
This new release offers many new features and improvements over previous versions. Here are the details regarding this update:
XPU support: Arnold 7.2.1 increases performance by using the XPU architecture, which supports not only Intel and AMD processors but also NVIDIA GPUs. This significantly reduces render times.
Optimized shading: Arnold 7.2.1 uses a new algorithm for shading calculations. This algorithm reduces render times while providing more natural and realistic shadows.
New Denoise feature: Arnold 7.2.1 offers a new denoise feature that reduces noise after rendering to produce cleaner images.
AOV improvements: Arnold 7.2.1 provides new filtering options for AOVs, allowing for more accurate AOV creation.
New shaders: Arnold 7.2.1 adds new shaders to make materials look more realistic. For example, new hair and skin shaders have been added.
In addition to these new features, Arnold 7.2.1 also includes performance improvements and bug fixes. This update is considered an important step for users in the 3D visualization industry.
