Live Tutorial: Working with Arnold 5

What is Arnold Render?

Rendering is the crucial step in image making. It’s where the 3D data becomes a finished 2D image or movie. You want a great tool for this important step! Arnold Render replaced Mental Ray in the Maya 2017 and Max 2018 and surprisingly, most artists and not previously used Arnold Render. Fear not, because it’s easy to learn, it’s scalable to whatever size project or team you have, it performs incredibly, and it’s award winning!

Toolfarm is proud to be carrying Arnold Render 5.0.  This major new update includes improved performance and new shaders, bundled with 3ds Max 2018. Arnold is now a standalone renderer as well as a plug-in for Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Katana.

PR: Arnold Render 5 Now Available        Learn more about Arnold

Supported Hosts:

• Maya 2015, 2016, 2016 Ext2, and 2017
• Cinema 4D R16, R17, and R18 (all products except Lite)
• Houdini, Houdini FX, Houdini Indie or Houdini Education (Houdini Apprentice is not supported)
• Katana 2.5
• Max 2018
• Softimage 2013, 2014 and 2015

Arnold For Maya Tips Tricks Webinar May 11, 2017

John Paul Giancarlo, M&E Technical Specialist for South Europe, based in Barcelona, gives some tips on using Arnold for faster renders and some new features. The video lists what’s covered exactly.

1. Advised Render Settings for faster look development work
2. Advance Shading Networks – Using the debug mode to speed up work
3. Converting Bitmaps to TX – TX Manager when to use it
4. Area Light Changes in Arnold 5
5. Render overrides – changing multiple objects render attributes
6. Rendering Curves with Arnold
7. Creating Stand-ins to optimize scene size
8. New workflow for rendering Open VDB – Volumetric Data
9. Faking Indirect bounces to speed up render times by 1000% or more.

Live Tutorial: Working with Arnold 5

Arvid Schneider explains lighting and shading a scene from start to finish with Arnold 5. “I am using an arnold learning scene with a fishbowl. Creating shaders and mixing them together.”

His results are on Dropbox here and here.

Check out another tutorial from Arvid Schneider, MtoA 204 | Iridescence | Material series using Arnold with Maya 2017

Free Shaderset with tutorials from Kungujackrabbit

Garry from Kungfujackrabbit has some great stuff for you to check out. Download an Arnold shader set which includes 12 base Arnold shaders plus a Maya project file so you can see what the lighting looks like. he Arnold shader set is available for Windows and Mac.

Learn more

And I use the shader briefly in the tutorial videos.

• Arnold Quick Lighting Setup part 1
• Arnold Quick Lighting Setup part 2

Previously on Maya Monday

• Maya Monday: Where did Arnold Go? – Check out my first Maya video, explaining how to fix a problem when Arnold disappeared after a Maya update.
• Maya Monday: mental ray vs. Arnold for Maya + Other Renderers