13 Feb 2025

MAXtoA 5.7.8.0 is a feature release using Arnold 7.3.7.0.

Installation

• Download Arnold for 3ds Max from your Autodesk Account. See Download Arnold for more information about downloading MAXtoA from your Autodesk Account.
• Follow these installation instructions.

Enhancements

• Improved, more realistic shadows for glass objects: Transparent objects like clear glass now cast shadows. The look of the shadow is controlled by the new transmission_shadow_density parameter on the openpbr_surface and the standard_surface shaders. (ARNOLD-6881, ARNOLD-15863, ARNOLD-15828)

• Improved Global Light Sampling (GLS) on glossy materials: GLS now takes material glossiness into account when sampling, which greatly enhances the quality especially when many small lights are present. It causes small slowdowns for fixed AA renders, but for adaptive renders, it brings overall speedups. For example, with adaptive in the robot scene below we achieved 1.7x speedup. This feature can be enabled and disabled using GLS_glossy_enable. (ARNOLD-15489)

_{Camera(AA): 2, Specular: 1.}

• Arnold Render View enhancements: UI polish with updated icons.

• Arnold Render Log enhancements: New tabs in the Arnold log viewer allows loading multiple logs at the same time.

• Abort On License Fail default change to True: It previously incorrectly defaulted to False. (MAXTOA-1897)

• Alembic Procedural motion blur keys: The Alembic procedural has two new parameters, transform_keys and deform_keys added. You can use these parameters to have a lower number of motion samples in the Arnold representation than in the alembic file. The parameters default to 0, which uses the original number of samples in the alembic file. (MAXTOA-1914)

• Improved instancing in the Alembic procedural: Instanced geometries are now better handled in Alembic. This fixes the known issues with make_instance, which is now enabled by default. (ARNOLD-15209, ARNOLD-8364, ARNOLD-8924, ARNOLD-7818)

• Optimized handling of interactive object visibility changes: Improved detection of visibility changes gives faster scene updates. (ARNOLD-15708)

• Set Hydra mode by default in the Stage object procedural The Max USD stage object now uses the Arnold Hydra mode for greater compatibility and performance. (MAXTOA-1906)

• Update Autodesk Analytics Program: A newer version of the Autodesk Analytics Program (ADP) has been integrated into Arnold. This brings performance and stability improvements. In particular, instead of waiting for five minutes, ADPClientService.exe now quits as soon as Arnold terminates and ADPClientService finishes its processing. (ARNOLD-15396, ARNOLD-12865)

• Update CER: The Customer Error Reporting (CER) library is updated to v7.1.3. (ARNOLD-13834)

• Update OpenImageIO: OpenImageIO has been updated to v2.6.3.0. (ARNOLD-13742)

USD Enhancements

• Better Hydra support: Improved compatibility with recent USD versions and Solaris:

  • Handle the DirtyRender tag properly in Hydra. usd#2170
  • Use Stop render instead of Pause render in Hydra, to avoid restarting renders when the user views a difference render output (AOV). usd#2177

• Add more render statistics: The time taken to read the stage is not included in the Arnold render stats. usd#2190

API Additions

• Nice name metadata for nodes and parameters - New metadata has been added for setting how a node or parameter name should appear in a UI called ui.name, currently used for openpbr_surface to be named *"OpenPBR Surface"* in LookdevX and MaterialX node definitions. (ARNOLD-15690)

• Shared Arrays - The new API function AiArrayMakeShared allows you to share a buffer with Arnold instead of copying it to an allocated Arnold AtArray. The owning application cannot modify or delete a shared buffer. Arnold calls the provided callback function passed to AiArrayMakeShared when Arnold is no longer using the buffer. Here is an example that shows a local buffer containing cube points shared with Arnold.

   const AtVector vlist[8] = {{-0.25, -0.25, -0.25}, {0.25, -0.25, -0.25},
                              {0.25, -0.25, 0.25},   {-0.25, -0.25, 0.25},
                              {-0.25, 0.25, -0.25},  {0.25, 0.25, -0.25},
                              {0.25, 0.25, 0.25},    {-0.25, 0.25, 0.25}};
   AiNodeSetArray(polymesh, USTR::vlist,
                  AiArrayMakeShared(8, AI_TYPE_VECTOR, &vlist[0]));

Bug Fixes

• ARNOLD-7549 - PNG textures with partial alpha render too dark
• ARNOLD-15556 - clip_geo not fully working with instances of procedurals
• ARNOLD-15828 - [GPU] Shadow artifacts with transmission or opacity
• ARNOLD-15901 - Random crash when updating instancers
• usd#2159 - User data errors with deformed meshes and subdivision
• usd#2168 - Updated code calling SamplePrimvar following the changes in USD 24.08 affecting motion blur.
• usd#2187 - Cannot override output image with Arnold product types

System Requirements

• Autodesk 3ds Max 2023, 2024, 2025
• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
• GPU rendering works requires an NVIDIA GPU with the Maxwell architecture or later. We recommend 560.76 or higher drivers.
• Optix denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA Compute Capability 5.0 and above.
• Intel OIDN GPU support is limited to:
  • Intel Xe dedicated and integrated GPUs
  • NVIDIA GPUs using Turing or newer architectures
  • AMD GPUs with RDNA2 (Navi 21 only) and RDNA3 (Navi 3x) architectures