Arnold for Maya 5.5.2 is a feature release that brings faster scene initialization, USD improvements, and upgraded third-party components.
See the Arnold for Maya release notes for the full list of recently added features and bug fixes.
General Enhancements
- Faster Polymesh Node Init: Time needed for polymesh node initialization has been reduced when there are many meshes being initialized at the same time on machines with many CPU cores. For instance, the Activision Caldera scene went from 63s to initialize to 8.7s on a 120-core Windows machine.
- Parallel Instancer Initialization: Multiple instancer nodes can now initialize at the same time. On a 120-core Windows machine the scene init time for the Intel Jungle USD scene went from 115s to 43s.
- Minor Imager Performance Improvement: Improvements in the Imager framework mean faster memory operations, cutting down stress test times. Stress tests demonstrate a reduction of 60 milliseconds per Imager chain.
- Parallel_Init Metadata: A warning is now printed when the parallel_init metadata is missing from a procedural. Missing metdata results in parallel_init being disabled for the procedural, which can result in slower scene initialization for those procedurals that could have safely benefited from parallel initialization.
Enhancements for USD
- Optimize Invisible Primitives: Don't translate invisible primitives to Arnold when using the render delegate, which can significantly reduce the scene memory used.
- Optimize Unused Child Nodes: Destroy child nodes in the Hydra procedural instead of disabling them. This reduces the memory footprint on some scenes.
- Update Default Interactive FPS: Improve the default interactive frames per second (FPS) settings in the render delegate, allowing faster maximum FPS and slower minimum FPS.
- Optimize Display Driver Creation: The render delegate now uses a single display driver for all AOVs, instead of using one driver per AOV. This reduces initialisation and render time.
- Angular Velocity: The point instancer angular velocity now works in the render delegate.