Features
Memory-efficient, scalable ray tracer
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Arnold GPU
Arnold GPU allows users to switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering. (video: 1:55 min.)
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Subsurface scatter
High-performance ray traced subsurface scattering eliminates the need to tune point clouds.
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Hair and fur
Memory-efficient ray traced curve primitives help you create complex fur and hair renders.
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Motion blur
3D motion blur interacts with shadows, volumes, indirect lighting, reflection, or refraction. Deformation motion blur and rotational motion are also supported.
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Volumes
The volumetric rendering system in Arnold can render effects such as smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow, and fire.
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Instances
Arnold can more efficiently ray trace instances of many scene objects with transformation and material overrides.
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Subdivision and displacement
Arnold supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces.
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OSL support
Arnold now features support for Open Shading Language (OSL), an advanced shading language for Global Illumination renderers.
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Light Path Expressions
LPEs give you power and flexibility to create Arbitrary Output Variables to help meet the needs of production.
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Adaptive sampling
Adaptive sampling gives users another means of tuning images, allowing them to reduce render times without jeopardizing final image quality.
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Toon shader
An advanced Toon shader is part of a non-photorealistic solution provided in combination with the Contour Filter.
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Denoising
Two denoising solutions in Arnold offer flexibility by letting designers use much lower-quality sampling settings.
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Flexible and extensible API
Integrate Arnold in external applications and create custom shaders, cameras, light filters, and output drivers.
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Stand-alone command-line renderer
Arnold has a native scene description format stored in human-readable text files. Easily edit, read, and write these files via the C/Python API.
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Standard Surface shader
This energy-saving, physically based uber shader helps produce a wide range of materials and looks.
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Standard Hair shader
This physically based shader is built to render hair and fur, based on the d'Eon and Zinke models for specular and diffuse shading.
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Alembic procedural
A native Alembic procedural lets users render Alembic files directly without any translation.
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Profiling API and structured statistics
An extensive set of tools lets users more easily identify performance issues and optimize rendering processes.
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Material assignments and overrides
Operators make it possible to override any part of a scene at render time and enable support for open standard frameworks such as MaterialX.
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Built-in Cryptomatte
Create ID mattes automatically with support for motion blur, transparency, and depth of field.