The Arnoldrenderer development team is pleased to announce the availability of Arnold (C4DtoA) 3.2.0 for Cinema4D. This release introduces Arnold 6.1.0.0 and is a feature release bringing a brand new post-processing framework (imagers), support for nested dielectrics, much improved progressive and adaptive sampling, on-demand texture loading on GPU, and a variety of enhancements and fixes.

Enhancements

Imagers: We're introducing a brand new framework to apply post-processing effects such as color correction, vignetting, or tone mapping. A new type of post-processing nodes called imagers operate on pixels before the output driver. Imagers can be chained. The initial set of imagers consists of:

. imager_exposure
. imager_color_correct
. imager_lens_effects
. imager_white_balance
. imager_tonemap

Imagers can be added as Post Effects (called Arnold Imager) to the Render Settings. Alternatively the list of imagers and attributes can be modified in the IPR Window on the new Imagers side panel.



Imagers work both in batch and interactive contexts. While imager parameters can change interactively during rendering, adding a new imager currently requires the render to be restarted, so it's a good idea to add the ones you will need to adjust at the beginning of an interactive session. We are looking at removing this limitation in a subsequent release. (core#8368, core#9716, core#9723, core#9724, core#9867, core#9868, core#9869, core#9938).

Nested dielectrics: Physically-correct reflection and refraction of rays in scenes with adjacent dielectrics, such as liquids in glass vessels, has been implemented by resolving overlapping, i.e. "nested", dielectrics via a priority system. This allows for more realistic renders of scenes such as glass containers with liquid contents and bubbles, correctly accounting for the change in the index of refraction as rays refract through the transparent media. The new dielectric_priority parameter on the standard_surface shader assigns a priority to the internal dielectric medium of the closed transparent object the shader is assigned to. These priorities specify that in an area of overlap of two transparent objects, only the highest priority dielectric medium exists (see the schematic glass of water below). The priority is simply a signed integer (default 0), which can be increased or decreased as needed to define the dielectric medium in the overlap areas. If priorities are made equal, then media are effectively blended in the overlap. The effect can be disabled globally with options.dielectric_priorities (Nested Dielectrics in the Advanced tab of the render settings) in case you need to revert to the legacy mode, which does not correctly compute the refractions. (core#6023)



Improved progressive and adaptive sampling: Better sampling now results in much faster noise convergence, especially with adaptive sampling enabled. (core#9941)


Improved performance on Windows: Arnold now runs on average 7-8% faster overall on Windows. (core#5481, core#9876, core#9975)
Improved IPR interactivity: IPR interactivity on both CPU and GPU, especially when moving the camera in a scene with many nodes (thousands to millions of meshes, ginstances, lights, shaders, etc.), is improved. For instance, a scene with 24,433 ginstances and simple shading went from 8 fps to 14 fps on the CPU and about 3 fps to 20 fps on the GPU. (core#8662, core#9918, core#10027, core#10029)
Improved performance in Toon on Windows: The contour_filter used for toon rendering should now be faster and scale better especially on Windows, with up to 3x speedups on AMD Threadripper 2 and up to 4x speedups on AMD Threadripper 3 CPUs. (core#7844)
Toon AOV prefix : The toon shader has a new optional aov_prefix that will be prepended to the toon AOVs' names. For instance, if aov_prefix is "toon_", the toon diffuse AOV will be written out to "toon_diffuse". This can be used when you need to access both the toon AOVs and the core's LPE AOVs. (core#9823)
Improved soft creases in adaptive subdivision: Normals for soft creases follow the geometry closer for low iterations. (core#9971)

GPU Enhancements

Improved on-demand loading of textures: The GPU renderer can now partially load textures which results in important GPU memory savings when using tiled and mipmapped textures, such as from .tx textures. In a typical scene, the amount of memory needed for textures could be reduced to be up to 5x smaller. A recent driver is needed for this feature (core#9984).

Arnold for Cinema4D (C4DtoA) supports most Cinema 4D features such as instances, cloners, deformers, generators, MoGraph geometry, hair, and ThinkingParticles. It also supports both animation and single frame distributed rendering in Team Render, allowing the use of all computers in a local network to speed-up Arnold rendering. Third-party plugins TurbulenceFD and X-Particles are natively supported, allowing artists to render high quality smoke, fire, and particle effects with fully interactive feedback. Other features include volume rendering with OpenVDB, a node-based material editor and a comprehensive list of shaders and utilities, including vertex maps and per-face materials.

Solid Angle SL is the technology company behind the Arnold rendering software, with offices in Madrid and London and customers throughout the world including Framestore, DreamWorks, ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks, MPC, The Mill, Mikros Image and Rising Sun Pictures. Arnold was designed from the ground up to efficiently raytrace the complex geometric datasets required for feature­-length CGI animation and big­ budget visual effects, while at the same time simplifying the pipeline, reducing the number of passes, minimizing storage requirements and greatly enhancing interactivity for lighting artists.

Product: Solid Angle Cinema4D to Arnold
Version: 3.2.0
Supported Architectures: x64
Website Home Page : www.arnoldrenderer.com
Language: english
System Requirements: PC / macOs *
Size: 2.3 Gb

Requirements & Platforms

Supported Cinema 4D versions:
- R20.057 and above
- R21.026 and above
- S22.016 and above
- R23.008 and above

- Windows 7 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
- OSX 10.11 or later.
- CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
- GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 450.57 or higher drivers on Linux and 451.77 or higher on Windows. See Getting Started with Arnold GPU for more information.
- Optix denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA Compute Capability 5.0 and above.