Arnold 5 - 3ds Max 2018 - good bye mental ray - hello Arnold!!

Hello everybody :)

As those of you who has downloaded 3ds max 2018, you've noticed two things: mental ray is gone, and in its place, you find Arnold 5 !

Going forward, anyone wanting to continue using mental ray, should talk to NVidia, who will be releasing it directly to users. It will not be available through Autodesk any more.

Arnold in Max

The last year for me has been busy as hell, but insanely fun!! We've done the impossible, and integrated a renderer fully in one year!

So when you do get 3ds max 2018 you will find Arnold 5 inside it - in the form of the MAXtoA plugin. The one that ships with max is build 712.

If you instead go to http://solidangle.com/arnold/download/#3dsmax

...you will find a much newer version. (Yes, even same day as 3ds max 2018 was released with MAXtoA built in, we released a new MAXtoA that was 100 builds newer...  :)

Yes, that's how we roll. Release newer stuff same day!

Arnold 5 is an amazing piece of technology, and working with it has been a complete joy. It's a giant step up from the old Arnold 4 both in features and technology, but more importantly in "cleanliness" of the API and its internal concepts.

The addition of "closures" is a complete godsend. This relegates the work of rendering to the renderer, as it should be. No longer are material shaders little dumb raytracers that count lights and shoot reflection rays. A material shader returns mix of BxDF closures, and the renderer itself takes care of doing "the right thing" with them.

That allows seamless mixing of materials including the AOVs (which are actually light path expressions), as well as mixing C++ based shaders with OSL shaders however one wants.

I am extremely happy to be working with Arnold and the Solid Angle team, and it's a fantastic piece of technology. Arnold 5 is a pure joy to code for, and Solid Angles willingess to simply remove and delete old stuff is very uplifting (but scary too :) )

I hope you guys will enjoy playing with Arnold 5 in 3ds max.

I will probably start a new blog for Arnold related rendering stuff going forward, coz posting it on a half-dead blog called "mental ray tips" seems.... well..... not exactly fitting.


Enjoy playing with it!


Render on!


/Z

This is the 100:th post...

...and it's only appropriate that it is about the fact that I've been hired by Autodesk.

Yes, you've seen Ken spill the beans over on CGTalk. It is true. Autodesk has hired me to handle rendering and funky stuff like that. Pixels. Whatnot. Friday sept 30:th is my last day at mental images/NVidia (which I end by doing the meet-and-greet-3d event in Berlin, see previous post), and Monday October 3:rd my first day at at Autodesk... this time around (I used to work for Autodesk in the past, doing mechanical design software).

This all started around some discussion between my good friends Neil Hazzard, Shane Griffith and myself back at EUE (all good friends which will now be my actual colleagues). It was thrown out as an idea, we pondered the thought, thought it made sense, and I talked to my managers at mental images/NVidia, and everybody thought it made a lot of sense.

Integration of mental ray and iray into Autodesk products have always been.. problematic. Integration work was done by Autodesk, but there was never a dedicated person with enough precise know-how of the nitty-gritty details to handle it (or sometimes simply not enough priority put on it). Well...... now I will be working there. 'nuff said :)

I think this will be interesting, and I've been "Shader Wizard" for mental images (now "NVidia ARC" - "Advanced Rendering Center") for 7+ years now, perhaps it's time to move forward to New Challenges. Todays physical rendering doesn't really require "shaders" in the same way it did in the past anyway..... 'tis all BSDF's and physics and shiny stuff :)

It's not like I'm moving far anyway. I will probably be in all the same meeting, just on the other "side"....

I think this will be really interesting, and the future is Bright (about 95000 cd/m^2 to be exact). Lets go there together.

With Sunglasses.

Also, as I type this I am finalizing some Really Cool Sh%t. Stay tuned - as always :)

/Z