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.
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