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Solid Angle Introduces Arnold 5.2

New release of Academy Award-winning rendering software includes new Cell Noise shader, multi-threaded Adaptive Subdivision, Texture Baking, and deeper integration with Cryptomatte.

Solid Angle has released Arnold 5.2. Building on the feature-rich additions ushered in with 5.1, the upcoming new release of the Academy Award-winning rendering software delivers a number of usability and performance enhancements, plus significant new features to improve workflows.

With nearly 200 bug fixes, this latest release continues to respond to user requests, helping them to render more quickly and efficiently while offering maximum flexibility no matter what their tools of choice.

Arnold 5.2 Highlights

  • Shader enhancements include a new Cell Noise shader and new Sheen function in the Standard Surface shader to render cloth-like microfiber materials or the peach fuzz on a face.
  • Adaptive subdivision is now up to 2x to 3x faster, even on a single thread, and is now multi-threaded to fully take advantage of machines with many cores, helping to solve major production bottlenecks.
  • Cell Noise shader in Arnold 5.2

    Texture baking is now supported with a native render-to-texture workflow.

  • New built-in Volume ID and Depth AOVs give users more control when rendering volumes.

Other user-requested updates include further adaptive sampling performance optimizations, Alembic procedural improvements, and deeper integration with Cryptomatte.

Significant updates have been made to the two denoisers introduced in 5.1. GPU memory consumption of the OptiX denoiser has been greatly reduced proportionally to the number of denoised AOVs for major speed improvements. Various bug fixes for the “noice” denoiser have improved the stability and overall usability for high-quality rendering.

For a full list of new features and functionality, see full release notes here. Arnold has supported plug-ins available for Maya, Houdini, Cinema4D, 3ds Max, and Katana.

Source: Solid Angle