5.4.4 - Arnold for Maya
29 August 2024
MtoA 5.4.4 uses Arnold 7.3.4.0 and is a minor feature release bringing improved viewport rendering for OpenPBR Surface
Installation
Download Arnold for Maya from your Autodesk Account. See Download Arnold for more information about downloading MtoA from your Autodesk Account.
Follow these installation instructions.
Enhancements
OpenPBR Surface specification used for viewport shading - The viewport representation of the aiOpenPBRSurface node now uses the OpenPBR Surface specification to represent the shading (MTOA-2038)
OpenPBR improvements
- View-dependent coat absorption: The coat lobe now more accurately models the absorption tinting at grazing angles, producing a slightly more realistic look. (ARNOLD-15377)
SSS color matching: The SSS model has been tuned to ensure that the color of dense SSS more closely matches the supplied
subsurface_color
, as required by the OpenPBR specification. (ARNOLD-15328) The following images compare diffuse base color with the subsurface colors of Standard Surface and OpenPBR Surface:- top row: diffuse with a given
base_color
- middle row: Standard Surface (dense) SSS, with same color assigned to
subsurface_color
- bottom row: OpenPBR (dense) SSS, with same color assigned to
subsurface_color
- top row: diffuse with a given
- Scaling of emission luminance from nits to Arnold units:
nits_per_unit
was added to theoptions
node, and OpenPBR Surface'semission_luminance
(in nits) is internally scaled down by thisnits_per_unit
value (defaulting to 1000) to bring it into Arnold units. This ensures that the default soft-maximum ofemission_luminance
of 1000 nits corresponds to the former behavior of Standard Surface atemission
1. (ARNOLD-15364)
Faster startup times on GPU: We have made several optimizations to improve startup and scene update time on GPU. These improvements will be most noticeable on scenes with many objects. Startup times on Windows are also now on par with startup times on Linux. On a scene with 1 million instances, we see the following improvements when compared to the previous release. (ARNOLD-15271, ARNOLD-15279, ARNOLD-15310)
7.3.3.1 7.3.4.0 Improvement GPU update time (Windows) 204s 17s 12X GPU update time (Linux) 37s 18s 2X Faster texture opacity lookups in OSL shaders: OSL shaders used in opacity inputs (for example OpenPBR Surface's
geometry opacity
) now read opacity mask textures faster and with smaller memory footprint. (ARNOLD-15340)Improved node and parameter introspection with kick
kick -info <node>
now groups node parameters by their UI Group metadata, or by whether the parameters are Input or Output. (ARNOLD-14198)For example, here's the first few UI groups of openpbr_surface:
$ kick -info openpbr_surface node: openpbr_surface type: shader implicit output: CLOSURE parameters: 65 multioutputs: 0 filename: <built-in> version: 7.3.4.0 Type Name Unlinkable Default Bounds ------------ ------------------------------------ ------------- --------- Base FLOAT base_weight 1 [0, 1] RGB base_color 0.8, 0.8, 0.8 FLOAT base_diffuse_roughness 0 [0, 1] FLOAT base_metalness 0 [0, 1] Specular FLOAT specular_weight 1 [0, +inf] RGB specular_color 1, 1, 1 FLOAT specular_roughness 0.3 [0, 1] FLOAT specular_ior 1.5 FLOAT specular_roughness_anisotropy 0 [0, 1] Transmission FLOAT transmission_weight 0 [0, 1] RGB transmission_color 1, 1, 1 FLOAT transmission_depth 0 [0, +inf] RGB transmission_scatter 0, 0, 0 FLOAT transmission_scatter_anisotropy 0 [-1, 1] FLOAT transmission_dispersion_abbe_number 20 [0, +inf] FLOAT transmission_dispersion_scale 0 [0, 1] BOOL transmission_transmit_aovs * false INT dielectric_priority * 0
kick -info <node>.parameter
now includes all available metadata for the parameter, including linkability, bounds, help, as well as the type, name, and default value. (ARNOLD-15306)$ kick -info openpbr_surface.fuzz_weight node: openpbr_surface param: fuzz_weight type: FLOAT default: 0 metadata: help: The presence weight of a fuzz layer that can be used to approximate microfibers, for fabrics such as velvet and satin as well as dust grains. max: 1 min: 0
Handle update for OSL shader changes: Information about shaders linked to an OSL shader is stored when using interactive render mode, so that any change in those shaders will cause the OSL shader to be automatically updated. (ARNOLD-14983)
Duplicate node name warnings: Warnings are emitted when adding a node with a name that already exists or renaming an existing node to an empty string. (ARNOLD-12596)
Bug Fixes
- MTOA-2043 - Hangs and crashes when adding/deleting duplicated standins
- MTOA-2039 - Arnold Viewport Render does not update on camera change.
- ARNOLD-14735 - OIDN denoiser bucket artifacts during negative-AA progressive passes
- ARNOLD-15380 - [GPU] small memory leak when using AOV shaders
- ARNOLD-15384 - [GPU] memory leak each time an OSL shader is modified
- ARNOLD-15385 - Crash on standard_volume when modifying material interactively
- ARNOLD-15392 - [GPU] small memory leak when using OSL shaders
System Requirements
- Maya 2023, 2024, or 2025
- 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.
- x86-64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
- macOS 10.13 or later, macOS 11 and later for Maya 2024
- Apple Mac models with M series chips:
- Natively supported by Arnold for Maya 2024
- Supported under Rosetta 2 mode for older versions of Maya
- GPU rendering and Optix denoising work on Windows and Linux only, and require an NVIDIA GPU with the Maxwell architecture or later.
- On Linux, we recommend 535.104 or higher drivers.
- On Windows, we recommend 537.13 or higher drivers.
- Intel OIDN GPU support is limited to:
- Apple native CPUs (M1 and newer)
- 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