In 2014, running iRay ActiveShade was a bit of a pain.

Also, for the already ActiveShade-capable renderer iRay, we improved the responsivness of a lot of the updates (no longer waits for mouse-up to apply changes).īe aware that not every scene edit is supported in ActiveShade, but a lot more than what was supported before now works much more streamlined. The main work that was done was to turn mental ray into an ActiveShade renderer, i.e. So people have been wondering WHAT THE HECK I've been up to the last year, since I've been qute. I will probably start a new blog for Arnold related rendering stuff going forward, coz posting it on a half-dead blog called 'mental ray tips' seems. I hope you guys will enjoy playing with Arnold 5 in 3ds max. Arnold 5 is a pure joy to code for, and Solid Angles willingess to simply remove and delete old stuff is very uplifting (but scary too :) ) I am extremely happy to be working with Arnold and the Solid Angle team, and it's a fantastic piece of technology. That allows seamless mixing of materials including the AOVs (which are actually light path expressions), as well as mixing C++ based shaders with OSL shaders however one wants. A material shader returns mix of BxDF closures, and the renderer itself takes care of doing 'the right thing' with them. No longer are material shaders little dumb raytracers that count lights and shoot reflection rays.

This relegates the work of rendering to the renderer, as it should be. The addition of 'closures' is a complete godsend. It's a giant step up from the old Arnold 4 both in features and technology, but more importantly in 'cleanliness' of the API and its internal concepts.

Release newer stuff same day!Īrnold 5 is an amazing piece of technology, and working with it has been a complete joy. (Yes, even same day as 3ds max 2018 was released with MAXtoA built in, we released a new MAXtoA that was 100 builds newer. The one that ships with max is build 712. So when you do get 3ds max 2018 you will find Arnold 5 inside it - in the form of the MAXtoA plugin. The last year for me has been busy as hell, but insanely fun!! We've done the impossible, and integrated a renderer fully in one year!

Mental ray 3ds max 2018