Well - I think I’m out. I know it’s not an airport so no need to announce my departure but if anyones listening at Autodesk and enough people leave out of frustration something may change with Autodesk’s attitude of silence.
I just finished the VFX on a Netflix released feature and I have another feature I start in late November. That said I am recommending to the studio we move to a Redshift pipeline and I will not be renewing my two personal Arnold licenses that expire this October. I will also be recommending my studio and agency clients migrate as well as we kick off new projects. Arnold is a non starter on Apple silicon and Arnold 7s IPR in windows is so much slower than 6 was - almost to the point of being unusable. Keep in mind this is on a 64 core 3990x with 256GB RAM. On the GPU side issues continue to remain undressed like how CPU/GPU seem to render specular refractions differently, the lack of trace sets, lack of sampling control outside of AA and adaptive.
Yes Redshift requires more twiddling and finessing to get a similar look but at this point it’s so much faster and I feel like the speed of development and responsiveness to issues at the Redshift team is so fast compared to what feels like lazy uninspired efforts and iterative improvements by Autodesk.
So long Autodesk - it was nice while it lasted.
