Arnold Released

[NextDesign]

The Arnold renderer has been released! I've been on the beta for a while, and I'm very happy with it.

Check it out,

http://www.solidangle.com/

[stwert]

Cool! That link seems broken by the way, is this the one you want? wdev1.solidangle.com

[NextDesign]

Works for me.

[David]

Great I've been meaning to have a play with Arnold.

[Gen]

Trying to get the trial up and running.

[tweetytunes]

I might just have to have a look at it too.

[Gen]

Has anyone else tooled around with it yet? One thing that's really poking at me is having to hunt down the various noise generating culprits. On the other hand, it's kind of bumming me out how simple and friendly some tasks are in comparison to Mental Ray lol.

[NextDesign]

I've been using it quite a bit. You can learn what the samples do here: Arnold for Maya Tutorial - Render Settings - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glij5HdW630)

You can also override them per shader/light if you wish as well.

[LauriePriest]

Its absolutely ammazing when it comes to handling huge quantities of geometry with raytracing.

[Jay]

They use it here at Framestore. I dont think Ive heard a bad word said about it while Ive been here.

As Mr Priest says, it just handles a hell of alot of geo, its quite staggering. To put into perspective, I recently finished a 15million poly spacecraft for a film and it 'just' rendered it with displacements and over 400 tiles of 8k textures, if it was MR, it would have just died there and then on the spot

Im going to have to try the demo...


next....

Jay

[Gen]

Well I'm having a rough time with it so far. I'm fiddling with a simple interior scene(a small room with a window), dome light with a physical sky, aiStandard mats and the grain just won't go away and I've been trying to balance the sampling. The render times shoot through the roof and the grain persists.

[LauriePriest]

Can you tell us how you're sampling in the shaders you're using.
Importance sampling based on the matterial your using should be driving how the sampling is done but I have no idea how it works out the box.

If your matterials are very diffuse you should be increase your light samples rather than BRDF samples. Pixel samples should be relatively low, you will have huge render times if you try and resolve it simply using pixel samples.

[Jay]

Gen, follow that you tube video, theres a load of stuff there it may help too

Jay

[Gen]

@Laurie

The light samples took me only so far, I left it at 3 since anything above that did nothing but increase render time. I've been going back and forth with the camera and diffuse samples. My searches turned up some info about interiors being a weak spot of the engine, I hope it's not true. And after some searching, I found out that the aiStandard does not have sample overrides since "since this was against their vision" of a simple straightforward renderer.

@ Jay

I did watch the video and did a good deal of googling as well, I picked up much of the same info from the user manual. What was surprising was the initial level of noise in my scene in comparison with that in the video. I think it's because my lighting conditions leaned heavily on bounce light(I didn't have this problem with the exterior test).

------

I keep hunting for some checkBox or slider I overlooked but this is really wearing on my patience.

[LauriePriest]

Can you try replacing the dome light with an area light maybe just to compare the difference in noise and performance?

Your setup shouldn't usually be a problem if the sampling method on the shader considers the solid angle ( happens to be the name of the people who make arnold) of the light. however if you have a very bright IBL and the light isn't being sampled properly you will get alot of noise.

There are useful AOVs you can use to debug scenes such and a sample count or render time aovs.

[Gen]

System:
i7 3.4GHZ, watercooled
16GB RAM (DDR3 2133)

Area light:
intensity - 1
exposure - 5
samples - 3

Render settings: default
AA - 3
Diffuse - 2
Glossy - 2
Refr - 2
SSS - 3
Volume - 0

Render time: 29secs
http://i.imgur.com/FsI6jPv.jpg (http://imgur.com/FsI6jPv)

There are no SSS shaders, no volumes, only aiStandards, none of which are refractive or even specular/reflective.

///////////
Test2

Diffuse - 5

Render time: 1min 42secs
http://i.imgur.com/Vp1vbbL.jpg (http://imgur.com/Vp1vbbL)


Apart from a sphere on a plane, a scene doesn't get much simpler than this and these render times are atrocious.

[NextDesign]

There are multiple ways to light a scene in Arnold, and some are faster than others. Take a look at this tutorial, which shows their individual strengths and weaknesses: https://support.solidangle.com/display/mayatut/Lighting+a+Room

You must keep in mind however that this is a real raytracer, not a hybrid like MR, which uses multiple hacks to increase its speed at the cost of physical correctness.

[Jay]

Is it using scene scale like MR does...just a thought as increased render times can be affected by scene size...it is still maya after all :)

Jay

[Gen]

I'll just have to rest this one down for now because it's just not working out, the render times are giving me headaches lol. Thanks for all the pointers guys, much appreciated!

[NextDesign]

If you forward me the ma, I'll take a look.

[Jay]

John, if you happy with arnold you should post your findings......

Jay

[Gen]

Meh, I've already uninstalled ol' Arnie and made my peace with it. Have you done interior tests with it?

I kinda feel like I hijacked this thread with my mini rants haha.

[Jay]

god Gen, you hijacker!! LOL....its not at all, its all relevant

Jay

[Skalman]

Judging from the link NextDesign posted it seems like this render is pretty damn awesome. I loved how this renderer is setup, easy and quick it seems like.