Arnold for Maya 2016

 First things first: getting it to work. Arnold cost money (unfortunately), but you can get a 15-day trial to try things out. It automatically installs the plugin for you.

Inside Maya, you need to go into your plugin manager and check the "mtoa.mll" plugin. Then, set Arnold as your default renderer in the render settings.


Okay, so the Arnold rendering tool is actually pretty awesome.

For one thing, it actually has different filters you can try out inside the render view. All you have to do is select the experimental option in the Arnold tab.

And then you get stuff like this:

Filter on lighting only 

Render based on your triangles; also known as the Crystal Tower

A filter for the different pieces of your object

My original tower, for comparison

There is also an in-program render for arnold itself, which automatically updates based on your camera. You can select just single parts to render, move the camera around (and not have to click on the render button), and even select certain objects inside the renderer itself!

you can move around and it will still render for you, which is really cool

 Arnold works with ray tracing and sampling, but also includes things like color correction for linear workflow.

the "sampling" tab just tells you how many rays will be bouncing around - the more there are, the more detailed things get, but also the longer the render time

 Arnold works really well with TX image files, which translate well for color correction. The converter from regular diffuse/spec/bump maps to TX files is under the utilities section in the Arnold tab. It's called the "tx manager".

Lighting in Arnold is very much like the systems already in place by Maya, but ten times better (though ten times dimmer from my personal experience).

Instead of intensity, Arnold has something called "exposure", which is essentially the same thing.
A major thing Arnold adds to the lighting is something called "AI Volume Scattering (which is accessed in the Arnold tab of the rendering preferences).

It adds in foggy effects for lights and is generally amazing (though it kills the processor).

LOOK HOW AWESOME THIS LOOKS

As seen above, you can also make meshes lights themselves. You just select the mesh and transform it into a light.

just select the mesh_light option under arnold translator

Area Lights in Arnold can now be changed into circles and cylinders, and have "shutter" effects if you want to use those.

There are photometric lights that imitate the values of artificial lights. They use IES files for their values.

There is a skylight that surrounds the scene and essentially imitates light from the sky, but unfortunately does not come with a background image.

For that, you use the AIphysical skylight. You just select an image and it does light based off of that.

from there you can also add smog, change the color of the lighting (at your own risk), and even change the position of the sun!


The materials of Maya are, to my knowledge, almost the same as Maya's, albiet with different names for the values. Like the lambert material for Maya, Arnold uses a material called AIStandardMaterial.

Matte makes an object one, flat color
Diffuse is for texturing
Extended Controls changes what parts of the object can be touched by light, and which turn into a black void
The section for Spec in Arnold is used for reflectivity, where weight is how detailed the reflections are, roughness is how blurry they are, and antisotropy tells you  in which direction does the light flow on the surface of the polygons.

To make a material transparent, you select the object and uncheck "opaque".
Then you edit the Spec and refractions of the object.

Refractions are good for simulating light bouncing inside of a mirror.


Arnold also has a special shader for hair and skin, which allows for the user to change the color of the tips and roots of the hair, as well as the glossiness of each strand.

For skin, Arnold goes into a little more depth (literally).

I made everything skin just because

With Arnold's skin shader, one can edit the multiple levels of skin, and how light will bounce between it all. This comes in sections of "shallow, middle, and deep". For texturing, Arnold, once again, prefers TX files.


Arnold also comes with a series of special effects that can be applied to scenes. Unlike the others, special effects are applied specifically through the camera settings.

Vignettes can be added through the filter map, either as transparent files or actual gradient materials.

Depth of field is something that can be played with through the values.
Focus distance tells you where the camera should focus.
Aperture Size is the size of the reflections.
Aperture blades are the shape of the reflections.
Curvature is how they should curve, etc.

look at that blur

The settings can also be changed through the depth of field tab (arnold is just more precise).

With materials, you can create an AI Ambient Occlusion and apply it to objects.

Okay to be quite honest I'm still not so sure how this one works.
I know that:
Spread is how blurry the shadows get
Falloff is how far the shadows go
Near Clip is how much of the "close" shadows are rendered
Far Clip is how much of the "far" shadows are rendered.


Do you want God Rays in your scene? Well with AIVolumeScattering you can do that! Under the environment tab of the Arnold Render Settings you can create an instance of AIVolumeScattering.

Unfortunately it is only compatible with point, area, and spotlights.

Under the AIVolumeScattering options are things like attenuation, samples, and antisotropy.

Attenuation is how far the light rays go
Samples determines how noisy things will be
Antisotropy works to scatter the rays


There is also a feature called AOV (arbitrary output variables), which is only available in the rendering view of Arnold. It basically changes how the final render will look. To activate it you just go to the render settings and enable the AOV in the AOV tab. AOV rendering serves a similar purpose to debugging a render, and specific render nodes can be made in the render settings.

You can also do batch renders for AOV (aka making separate render images for different modes). Just go to the render settings, select the common tab, create an AOV output folder in the exr format,right click, and select render pass.

Batch render it in the Render tab. Then you can open it up in photoshop to edit the separate layers/rendering formats.



From what I learned, Arnold isa really awesome and versatile rendering program. If it didn't cost money (and didn't take forever to render on my laptop, I'd be using it regularly.