Autodesk Arnold Renderer

Autodesk Arnold Renderer is a sophisticated Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer designed to handle the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and currently their primary renderer, the program is utilized by over 300 studios worldwide, including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill, and Digic Pictures. 

It was the primary renderer for dozens of films, including Monster House, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Pacific Rim, and Gravity. It runs as a standalone renderer on Linux, Windows, and macOS, with plug-ins for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. Maya and 3ds Max come with an interactive renderer built-in. The Arnold plug-in for Softimage is now available under the Apache2.0 open source license. It has appeared in numerous films, commercials, shorts, and video game cinematics.

• This trial will allow you to download and install the latest version. 
• Production-proven tools with easy and intuitive controls. 
• Stability you can rely on to handle your most complex work 
• Easily interacts with all major 3D DCC programs. 
• Highly configurable for pipeline integration. 
• A devoted and supportive community. 
• Explore the GPU beta for interactive look development and lighting. 
• The use of either watermarked or unwatermarked output for commercial purposes is strictly banned. 
• After finishing this process, you will be allowed to render without watermarks for 30 days. 
• This trial version functions identically to the commercial version. 
• When you purchase a license, you gain access to all of the plug-ins for free. This allows you to simply move between 3D software programs without having to pay for additional licenses. 

Arnold for Maya. 
Provides a nice interface for Autodesk Maya's photorealistic renderer. 

Arnold for Cinema4D 
Arnold for Cinema 4D (C4DtoA) bridges the gap between the regular Cinema 4D interface and the Arnold renderer. 

Arnold for Houdini. 
Arnold for Houdini (HtoA) bridges the gap between the conventional Houdini interface and the Arnold renderer. 

Arnold for Katana. 
Arnold for Katana (or KtoA) is a bridge to the Arnold renderer that runs within the normal Katana interface. 

Arnold for 3DS Max 
Provides a nice interface to the photorealistic renderer in Autodesk's 3ds Max. 

Arnold for SoftImage. 
The Softimage plug-in (SItoA) is no longer in active development. SItoA is currently available to the community under the Apache2.0 open source license. 

The renderer app is a physically-based raytracer that runs quickly, uses little memory, and is scalable. Its goal is to streamline the pipelines of VFX and animation firms by reducing the number of user interface elements and supporting a single pass approach that eliminates the associated storage and management costs. 

Fur and Hair 
Autodesk Arnold Renderer for PC is the ideal choice for producing fur and hair with minimal memory requirements thanks to its efficient raytraced curve primitive. Its hair shader features double offset speculators, transmission, and is specifically developed to prevent flickering in thin hairs. 

Motion blur 
Accurate 3D motion blur interacts properly with shadows, volumes, indirect illumination, reflection, and refraction. Deformation motion blur is highly efficient and works with polygons, hairs, and particles. Rotational motion describes exact circular arcs. 

Sub-surface scattering. 
The raytracing-based subsurface scattering technique eliminates the need to tune point clouds. It's simple to use, requires no additional memory, offers motion-blurred and interactive lighting, and scales ideally as more CPU threads are utilized. 

The volumetric rendering system uses patented significance sampling techniques to generate effects like smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow, and fire. Volumes interact with direct and indirect illumination from various area light sources. Supports both OpenVDB and MayaFluids. 

Flexibility and extensibility 
TDs and programmers can use an easy-to-use C++ API with Python bindings to link the app with external applications and develop custom shaders, cameras, light filters, and output drivers. It has been implemented into a variety of commercial and proprietary applications. 

Scalability 
The application is meticulously multi-threaded and takes maximum advantage of all available CPU cores. Even for standard single-threaded processes like procedural geometry loading, displacement, and ray acceleration building. Hyper-threading adds a respectable 20% speedup. 

It can efficiently trace instances of any scene object, including those with transformations and material overrides. It is simple to construct thousands or even millions of instances, resulting in billions of renderable primitives that are ideal for vegetation, big settings, and effects. 

Memory efficient. 
Arnold's small and highly optimized data structures allow you to render scenes containing hundreds of millions of unique primitives quickly and with a far lower memory footprint than competing renderers. 

Deferred geometry loading 
Geometry can be generated on-demand using "procedural" nodes (or stand-ins), rather than ahead. This enables for the modular building of scenarios. Procedural nodes can point to ASS, OBJ, PLY, and DLL/DSO files, enabling programmatic scene building and compositing. 

Subdivision and displacement 
It supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Subdivided vertices are subsequently vector-displaced using arbitrary shader networks. High frequencies can be immediately captured as a bump map, eliminating the need for extensive subdivision. 

Arbitrary Output Variables (AOV) 
It can generate any number of AOVs or passes for compositing, including normal, Z-depth, position, and ID masks. It also handles deep image data. Shaders can generate their own custom outputs (such as direct and indirect diffuse, specular, and SSS). 

Standalone command-line renderer. 
It supports a native scene description format that is saved in human-readable text files (Scene Source, or.ass). These files can be easily updated, read and written via the C/Python API, lazily loaded at render time, or supplied into the command-line renderer kick. 

Please note that this is a 30-day trial version.