What is Arnold?
Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures. Arnold was the primary renderer on dozens of films from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity. It is available as a standalone renderer on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, with supported plug-ins for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. It is the built-in interactive renderer for Maya and 3ds Max.
Photorealistic
"Arnold gives us outstanding image quality and the ease of set up that today’s productions demand. I’m thrilled we are able to add it to the arsenal of tools at ILM."
John Knoll, ILM
Easy to Use
"Everything about Arnold is easier – whether it’s the straight-forward controls for the artist or the clean consistent API for the developer."
Chad Dombrova, Luma Pictures
Memory Efficient
"The software is robust and can reliably function with extra-ordinarily large data sets."
Dave Levy, The Mill
Easy to Switch
"Arnold has been a revelation both in the minimal time required for us to port all our pipeline to support it, and in the ease by which our lighters have switched to using it."
Martin Preston, Framestore
Supported Arnold Plug-ins
Arnold has supported plug-ins available for Maya, Houdini, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Katana. The Arnold plug-in for Softimage is now available under an Apache2.0 open source license.
Where have you seen Arnold?
Arnold has been used in dozens of films, commercials, shorts and video games cinematics. For examples take a look at our gallery and news articles.
