Autodesk Arnold 7.2.1 Has Been Released

The upgraded renderer features a new distance shader, enhanced light sampling, better USD support, multiple bug fixes, and more.

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.

And here are some more of Arnold 7.2.1's new features:

  • Improved triangle intersector: Triangle intersection is now 20% faster and less likely to allow rays to incorrectly slip between triangles, which manifested as holes in a mesh.
  • Faster loading of OpenVDB volumes in Windows: On Windows, OpenVDB volumes are faster to load, especially on certain many-core CPUs.
  • Faster instancer initialization: The instancer procedural is now faster on single-socket CPUs.
  • alembic.objectpath changed to an array: The Alembic procedural parameter objectpath is now an ARRAY type, so multiple object paths can be given to a single Alembic procedural.
  • uv_transform improvements: The uv_transform shader now has a wset parameter, which is the name of a float user data value. A new matrix attribute uvw_matrix returns new coordinates based on the uvw values. If the new attribute uvcoords is linked to a shader, the values returned by that shader override the uv coordinates, at the cost of efficiency because this prevents Arnold from using the correct filtering.
  • Motion blur with set_transform: The set_transform operator now has a matrix attribute, that can be animated. This allows set_transform to apply animations and get correct motion blur.

You can find the full list of updates here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

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