MtoA 5.3.3

[Stephen.Blair]

Installation

• Download the Arnold for Maya plugin
• Follow these installation instructions.

Enhancements

• Global light Sampling support on GPU: Global Light Sampling (GLS) is now available with GPU rendering. Many scenes with moderate to large number of lights render 2-6x faster with GLS. Scenes that do not benefit from GLS tend to be a few percent faster or slower. See the GLS documentation for important information on the optimal number of light samples to use with GPU. (ARNOLD-13109)

Speedup over 7.2.2 GPU version using 1 light sample
City (100000 lights)	Classical interior (80 lights)	Automotive studio (9 lights)
48x speedup	2x speedup	2.6x speedup

• Procedural Viewport Improvement: Better representation of current frame of procedurals in viewport [MTOA-1480]

• Return direction and distance to nearest hit in distance shader: Arnold 7.2.3 adds out_distance and out_direction output parameters to the distance shader, which return the direction and distance to the nearest surface, respectively. The shader still returns the color-mapped result by default, which is now available as the out_rgb parameter. (ARNOLD-13473)

distance shading effect

Tutorial - Building facade fire damage

Tutorial - Eye makeup shading effect

• state_float, state_int, state_vector multiple outputs: The shading state shaders now have multiple outputs, so you can use a single state shader with multiple output connections in a shading network. (ARNOLD-13579)

USD Enhancements

• Support vertex UV coordinates on Curves in the render delegate usd#1435
• Curves without width should render with a default value usd#1579

API Additions

• AiProceduralExpand: A new API AiProceduralExpand expands on demand the contents of a procedural (such as a 'usd', 'alembic', or 'procedural' node), as it would happen in a regular render. You can use this to force the creation of procedural child nodes before the rendering starts, and to avoid race conditions when the procedurals are not thread safe. (ARNOLD-7067)

Bug Fixes

• MTOA-991 - Crash when undoing after accessing Arnold viewport

• MTOA-985 - MaterialX exported USD file doesn't render in MtoA

• MTOA-1407 - XgenArnoldUI.py syntax warning

• MTOA-1488 - Crash when deleting imager

• MTOA-1326 - Scene crashes Maya when you try to create a render layer

• MTOA-1342 - Changing layers in Render Setup starts a render

• MTOA-1185 - Render Sequence leaks memory

• ARNOLD-13139 - Docked ARV resizes itself when printing status messages

• ARNOLD-10643 - FIS no longer forces a box filter

• ARNOLD-12917 - Viewport API uses incorrect motion blur reference time

• ARNOLD-13645 - Instancer crash if a single node is instanced but set to null

• ARNOLD-13678 - Holes in alpha channel when opacity is almost 1

• ARNOLD-13741 - Log messages missing colors

• ARNOLD-13770 - Name scope clashes with nested procedurals

• ARNOLD-13776 - NaNs when using global light sampling with low-light-threshold

• ARNOLD-13789 - Corrupted tiff output if skip_alpha and unpremult_alpha are both enabled

• ARNOLD-13908 - Licensing fails on Windows and macOS

• usd#1538 - Fix triplanar in USD MaterialX

System Requirements

• Maya 2022, 2023 or 2024
• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.
• x86-64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
• macOS 10.13 or later, macOS 11 and later for Maya 2024
• Apple Mac models with M series chips:
  • Natively supported by Arnold for Maya 2024
  • Supported under Rosetta 2 mode for older versions of Maya
• GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ada, Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 525.89 or higher drivers on Linux and 528.49, or higher on Windows. See Arnold GPU for more information.
• For GPU rendering, the cache also 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. More information can be found here.
• Optix™ denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.

[siobhan-p]

Thanks for that Stephen, some great stuff in there.

I'm having problems getting this version of MtoA/ Arnold to play with Bifrost.

I've tried Bifrost 2.7.0.1 and 2.7.1.0 but get a crash.
Do you have any advice?

Many Thanks

Siobhan

[nobody_b]

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@Stephen.Blair wrote:

• Procedural Viewport Improvement: Better representation of current frame of procedurals in viewport [MTOA-1480]

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hey, can you elaborate on this? is there before / after screenshot comparison?

[Stephen.Blair]

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@nobody_b wrote:

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@Stephen.Blair wrote:

• Procedural Viewport Improvement: Better representation of current frame of procedurals in viewport [MTOA-1480]

---

hey, can you elaborate on this? is there before / after screenshot comparison?

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MTOA-1480 is about the viewport display of aiStandIn nodes that have motion blur. After this change, the viewport position of the aiStandIn matches the non-motion-blurred position of the actual geometry. Previously, it looked like the start-on-frame position instead of the center-on-frame position.

[toby.gainesQTXCX]

Do you *ever* plan on making the camera stay set to the camera we want to render to? 

And make it so that it really renders to the camera it's set to, all the time? 

I've had to switch the camera back & forth to get it to use the right one, a dozen times a day, every day, for almost 4 years. As long as I've been using Arnold/Maya. There's so much junk like this to deal with, that I sometimes forget what real work I'd planned to do. Seems like you're happy selling a sloppy product?