7.2.3.0

9 August 2023

Important:

Arnold 7.2.3.1 has an important licensing fix for Windows and macOS (there was no issue on Linux).

Arnold 7.2.3.0 is a feature release.

Enhancements

Global light Sampling support on GPU: Global Light Sampling (GLS) is now available with GPU rendering. Many scenes with moderate to large number of lights render 2-6x faster with GLS. Scenes that do not benefit from GLS tend to be a few percent faster or slower. See the GLS documentation for important information on the optimal number of light samples to use with GPU. (ARNOLD-13109)


Speedup over 7.2.2 GPU version using 1 light sample
City (100000 lights)	Classical interior (80 lights)	Automotive studio (9 lights)

48x speedup	2x speedup	2.6x speedup

Return direction and distance to nearest hit in distance shader: Arnold 7.2.3 adds out_distance and out_direction output parameters to the distance shader, which return the direction and distance to the nearest surface, respectively. The shader still returns the color-mapped result by default, which is now available as the out_rgb parameter. (ARNOLD-13473)



distance shading effect (Tip: Before you Play, right click and click Loop)



Tutorial - Building facade fire damage



Tutorial - Eye makeup shading effect

state_float, state_int, state_vector multiple outputs: The shading state shaders now have multiple outputs, so you can use a single state shader with multiple output connections in a shading network. (ARNOLD-13579)

AiProceduralExpand: A new API AiProceduralExpand expands on demand the contents of a procedural (such as a 'usd', 'alembic', or 'procedural' node), as it would happen in a regular render. You can use this to force the creation of procedural child nodes before the rendering starts, and to avoid race conditions when the procedurals are not thread safe. (ARNOLD-7067)

ARNOLD-10643 - FIS no longer forces a box filter
ARNOLD-12917 - Viewport API uses incorrect motion blur reference time
ARNOLD-13645 - Instancer crash if a single node is instanced but set to null
ARNOLD-13678 - Holes in alpha channel when opacity is almost 1
ARNOLD-13741 - Log messages missing colors
ARNOLD-13770 - Name scope clashes with nested procedurals
ARNOLD-13776 - NaNs when using global light sampling with low-light-threshold
ARNOLD-13789 - Corrupted tiff output if skip_alpha and unpremult_alpha are both enabled
usd#1538 - Fix triplanar in USD MaterialX

Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.
macOS 10.13 or later.
x86-64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set. Apple Mac models with M series chip are natively supported.
GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 525.89 or higher drivers on Linux and 528.49, or higher on Windows. See Arnold GPU for more information.
For GPU rendering, the cache also needs to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver, or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system. More information can be found here.
OptiX™ denoiser requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.