SAN FRANCISCO — Autodesk (www.autodesk.com) has released Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU, which is designed to simplify how artists and studios create content, giving them speed and flexibility, as well as the ability to scale rendering capacity. Arnold’s intuitive interface makes it easy to toggle between CPU and GPU rendering, maintaining the same settings with a single click. Arnold GPU is based on Nvidia’s OptiX framework and is optimized to take advantage of Nvidia RTX technology.
“Rendering workloads continue to grow as content providers strive to meet rising audience expectations for content quality,” says Chris Vienneau, senior director, media & entertainment products, Autodesk. “Speed and interactivity have become more crucial than ever to the creative process. Arnold 6 delivers performance gains that will help lighten the load with the same high-quality render results that the CPU renderer is known for. We’ve worked closely with Nvidia to optimize Arnold GPU to run on the latest RTX GPUs and RTX Server, and we’re excited to get this latest update into the hands of new and existing Arnold customers.”
“Arnold GPU powered by Nvidia RTX GPUs will help graphics professionals work faster, meet tight deadlines, and explore new ideas during the creative process,” adds Richard Kerris, industry general manager for media & entertainment, Nvidia. “Autodesk was the first company to commit to RTX for their Arnold renderer, and we think artists are going to be blown away by the new interactivity, flexibility, and unmatched speed of final rendering using GPUs in Arnold 6.”
First unveiled as a beta release in March, Arnold 6 completes the Arnold GPU toolset with improvements across lights, shaders and cameras, as well as on-demand texture loading and support for Open Shading Language (OSL) and OpenVDB volumes. Additionally, as part of Autodesk’s continued efforts to accelerate the adoption of open standards, a collection of components for Arnold in the USD ecosystem is now available online.
Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU is available as a standalone subscription or with a collection of end-to-end creative tools within the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection. For the first time, monthly, annual, and three-year single-user subscriptions of Arnold are available on the Autodesk e-store. Arnold GPU is also available to try with a free 30-day trial of Arnold 6. Arnold GPU is available in all supported plug-ins for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D and Katana.