MADRID/LONDON — Solid Angle (www.solidangle.com) is at SIGGRAPH with the latest version of its Arnold renderer, which is delivering significant speed gains over previous versions. Users are reporting a 25 to 50 percent performance gain on actual production scenes while simultaneously reducing the memory footprint and noise levels.
The 4.2.x release series is focused on performance, while additional optimizations will be progressively deployed throughout the year. The new release is based on the production proven V.4.x Arnold architecture, making the performance increases immediately available to clients as a drop-in replacement with no pipeline changes necessary.
“We are delighted by the feedback our customers are giving us,” says Solid Angle founder and CEO Marcos Fajardo. “It’s gratifying to see our investment in R&D is paying off — we established the benchmark and set the trend for global illumination rendering several years ago, and now we are re-defining performance. Arnold 4.2 has set a new standard.”
The performance enhancements are a direct result of the increased investment in R&D (up 40 percent in the core development team in the past year alone) with key additions including rendering experts Iliyan Georgiev and Brecht Van Lommel amongst others, and the appointment of VFX supervisor Anders Langlands as creative director.
Solid Angle is also showing two new bridges – one for Houdini and another for Cinema 4D. Arnold for Houdini provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface. Having been in beta for several months, the plug-in has already been used in production by many studios, including Prime Focus World for Hercules and Vampire Academy, Milk VFX for the Sherlock and Doctor Who TV series, and Framestore NY for the Captain Morgan commercials. Arnold for Houdini is due for release during SIGGRAPH and will be available free-of-charge to customers licensing the Arnold core renderer.
SIGGRAPH 2014 also marks the first public showing of Arnold for Cinema 4D. After more than a year of independent development, the C4DtoA plug-in will allow Cinema 4D artists direct access to the advanced rendering capabilities of Arnold. Currently in alpha, C4DtoA is slated for release in Q4 2014.