New Stylized Rendering Capabilities
The latest version of the Arnold render engine introduces full support for toon shading effects when working with GPU. This implementation allows for the creation of cartoonish visual styles, although it maintains some technical limitations in its initial version.
GPU rendering for toon effects currently only supports direct lighting and is incompatible with reflections and other advanced effects.
Key Performance Optimizations
- Substantial improvement in scenes with procedural instances
- Reduced initialization times on multi-core systems
- Up to 18x faster in complex scenes according to benchmarks
- New global light sampling system
Enhanced Workflows
The native integration with Hydra for USD files ensures greater consistency in results. Furthermore, the new HTML-based performance analysis tool makes it easier to identify issues in complex scenes.
Compatibility and Availability
All major plugins have received simultaneous updates. The version supports the main operating systems, although GPU rendering remains limited to NVIDIA hardware on Windows and Linux platforms.