Share

5.7.5.0 - Arnold for 3ds Max

18 September 2024

MAXtoA 5.7.5.0 is a major feature release using Arnold 7.3.4.1.

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

  • OpenPBR Material Support: 3ds Max 2025.3 introduces a native OpenPBR Material. To avoid user confusion and duplicating functionality, the Arnold OpenPBR Surface is hidden in the material browser when you use a version of 3ds Max that supports the OpenPBR Material. Using the native 3ds Max OpenPBR Material makes it easier to switch between different renderers. You can still create the Arnold version of the node through scripting, import it from older scenes, or load it from ass or usd files. You can override this behavior by setting the environment variable MAXTOA_OPENPBR_VISIBLE=1 (MAXTOA-1833)

  • OpenPBR Surface Viewport Improvements: The 3ds Max High Quality viewport uses a full-featured viewport shader for the Arnold OpenPBR Surface shader. (MAXTOA-1844)

  • Arnold specific options added to Physical Material: The 3ds Max Physical Material, which renders as an Arnold Standard Surface, has two rollouts, which give you access to all the features of Standard Surface. (MAXTOA-1517)

  • Arnold specific options added to OpenPBR Material: Similarly, the Arnold OpenPBR Surface has a few extra options (such as indirect_diffuse, AOV options, etc.) compared to the 3ds max native OpenPBR Material. These are now available as additional rollouts, in the same way as for Physical Material. This allows user to always use the OpenPBR Material and still have access to all Arnold-specific features. (MAXTOA-1517)

  • Aligning options.nits_per_unit with the Physical Scale: MAXtoA now automatically sets the options.nits_per_unit based on the 3ds Max Physical Scale parameter, to align physical luminance values across 3ds Max to render the same. This may slightly change the appearance of renders compared to MAXtoA 5.7.4.0 where options.nits_per_unit was always using its default value of 1000, whereas now it is given the value of the Physical Scale divided by pi. (MAXTOA-1834)

Bug Fixes

  • MAXTOA-1791 - Arnold RenderView crashes when you click a light with Light Shape Visible enabled.
  • MAXTOA-1874 - A bug in the toolbar button "IPR in Arnold Render View" would incorrectly wait for the render to be complete, instead of starting it interactively. This is fixed.
  • ARNOLD-14289 - Crash when interactively removing operator nodes
  • ARNOLD-15406 - [GPU] Uninitialized memory causing random crashes
  • ARNOLD-15437 - open_pbr_surface was not supported in arnold MaterialX implementation
  • ARNOLD-15445 - [GPU] Crash with multiple GPUs
  • ARNOLD-15465 - Setting IOR to high values in OpenPBR causes NaNs
  • usd#2090 - Fixed crashes when registering the TfNotice callback multiple times

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 537.13 or higher drivers.
  • Optix™ denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.

Was this information helpful?