Supported Features

1. CADnetwork Render-Guide Distributed Rendering With Arnold And ...
2. Arnold Render Blender
3. Team Render Server Fails To Render AOVs - Arnold
4. Getting Started With Arnold GPU - Arnold Renderer

Arnold GPU supports a set number of Arnold features, including arbitrary shading networks, SSS, hair, atmospherics, instancing, and procedurals. See here for a detailed list of Arnold GPU features and known limitations.

System Requirements

CADnetwork Render-Guide Distributed Rendering With Arnold And ...

Arnold Render replaced Mental Ray in the Maya 2017 and Max 2018 and surprisingly, most artists and not previously used Arnold Render. Fear not, because it’s easy to learn, it’s scalable to whatever size project or team you have, it performs incredibly, and it’s award winning! Toolfarm is proud to be carrying Arnold Render 5.0. That being said we all know Arnold is designed to work as it's name-sake. It is brute force, and a high quality render is slower than molasses. I'd love to see GPU rendering for Arnold. Team Render, including single-frame distributed rendering. Support for third party plugins like X-Particles and Turbulence FD. Arnold for Houdini. Arnold for Houdini (or HtoA) provides a tight bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface, in a way that is familiar to both Houdini users and Arnold users in Maya. 'Arnold enabled us to render 800,000 Christmas tree needles dropping an amazing quality and pretty fast turnaround on a recent Morrisons commercial. A feat our 3D team don't think would have been possible in any other render software.'

Arnold GPU works on NVIDIA GPUs of the Turing, Volta, Pascal, and Maxwell architectures. Multiple GPUs will improve performance, and NVLink can be used to connect multiple GPUs of the same architecture to share memory (On Windows, we recommend enabling SLI as well).

Using Team Render Cinema 4D to Arnold offers a full support of Team Render, the network rendering framework of Cinema 4D. You can increase your render capacity and significantly decrease render times by rendering a single frame or an animation (frame sequence) distributed to multiple machines on your network.

Recommended NVIDIA drivers:

• Linux455.38 or higher
• WindowsGeForce: 457.30 or higher, Quadro: 457.09 or higher
• macOS is not supported

Pre-populating the GPU cache

Arnold Render Blender

The very first time you render with the GPU, the GPU renderer has to create a cache for the types of shaders and objects used. This can delay the time to the first pixel for your first render. To avoid these one-time delays, we recommend doing some of this in advance by pre-populating the cache before you do any renders as this will fill in the cache with a subset of the most common shader/object combinations. The Arnold plugins (like MtoA) have Pre-Populate GPU Cache menu command, and kick has a -gpu_warm flag. Note that pre-populating the cache can take up to 15 minutes. The cache only needs to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver, or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system.

Selecting a Render Device

You can easily switch between CPU and GPU with a single click. In the Arnold plugins, you'll find a new Render Device setting in the Render Settings > System section.

Team Render Server Fails To Render AOVs - Arnold

You can use CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES (environment variable) to limit which GPUs Arnold (and any other Cuda based application) can see.

Matching Noise on CPU and GPU

Matching noise can take a little experimentation because Arnold GPU uses Camera (AA) sampling only. We recommend you also use Adaptive sampling. Here are some guidelines:

• Set the Max. Camera (AA) in the range of 30 to 50 (depending on the scene, you might go closer to 100). In general, the max samples should be a large value. A large max samples means that the quality is controlled by the noise falling under the threshold, instead of by clamping to the max AA.
• Set the Adaptive Threshold to something like 0.015 or 0.02. For a noise-free render, lower the threshold value, maybe even as far as 0.010.
• Set the Camera (AA) samples to around 3 or 4. One of the few reasons to go higher with AA is for motion blur. The higher the number of Camera (AA) samples, the less of a speedup you'll get from adaptive sampling.

Textures

Getting Started With Arnold GPU - Arnold Renderer

All textures must fit in memory. We recommend you use tiled and mip-mapped TX textures. If you're running out of memory, you can set a maximum resolution for textures in the Render Settings.