Arnold for 3ds Max is provided by the MAXtoA plug-in.

Release Date

April 12, 2017

This version uses the Arnold 5.0.0.0 core, and is MAXtoA build 812 .

MAXtoA 1.0.712 and newer requires 3ds Max 2018. There are no newer build for 3ds Max 2017 than MAXtoA 0.9.608.

Installation

Get the installer on Solid Angle Downloads .

New Feature Highlights

• Standard Surface material.
• Standard Hair material.
• Standard Volume shader.
• [Atmosphere Volume] shader support.
• More than 80 optimized utility shaders now built into the Arnold core rendering library.
• Support for OSL shaders .
• Faster rendering of .vdb files, using OpenVDB 4.0.
• Faster rendering of hair.
• Light group AOVs for surfaces and volumes.
• Roundness and soft edge options for quad and spot light types.
• Improved sampling for area lights.
• Global geometry, subdivision and hair settings.
• Global motion blur shutter behavior settings.
• VR camera.
• Standard surface and Arnold light scene converter scripts.
• OIIO upgraded to version 1.7.12.

Known Issues

• This release of MAXtoA does not include support for all Arnold or 3ds Max features. See the online documentation for further details.

• Arnold 5 adds the new data type "closure", and shaders that return closures will now show up in 3ds Max as materials instead of maps. Due to this and the large number of other changes in Arnold 5, scenes made in 0.9.608 or earlier (for 3ds Max 2017) are not supported, and will load with many warnings about missing shaders.

• Some shaders have been removed since version 1.0.712, and these will be reported as missing upon load.