Solid Angle has released a new Arnold Renderer showreel!
Clients with work featured in the reel include Cube, Digic Pictures, Framestore, The Frank Barton Company, Glassworks, Ilion Animation Studios, Jellyfish Pictures, Light and Mathematics, Mikros Image, The Mill, Not To Scale, Nozon, Polynoid, Psyop, Qvisten Animation AS, Rovio Entertainment, Shed, Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks & Waterproof Studios.
Music: “Here I Am” - Bleech
Thanks for the post.
I’ve noticed the rise of Arnold’s render’s popularity for awhile now but I have no real clue as to why. Anyone can shed some light especially for a small studio what its capabilities are or it’s benefits compared to other renders? Or isit built for a big facility?
FXGuide has same nice articles on the art of rendering and the state of rendering:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-art-of-rendering/
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-state-of-rendering/
Arnold is an incredibly fast pathtrace renderer that produces great images without having the complex setup usually associated with PRMan and it is cheaper. Its not built strictly for big facilities as there are plenty of small studios that utilize it. The only requirement though is you have to purchase at least 5 licences which do not differentiate between workstation or render license. I use Arnold with Maya and Softimage and though it was not cheap (still $11K cheaper than PRMan) it was well worth it.
Arnold is fairly scalable to size of implementation. I’ve heard of single users using it(in the beta, I think it’s now a 5license min) and we are using it as the primary render at Imageworks.
Arnold’s strength is that it’s a highly optimized raytracing renderer. It’s also very easy to use.
Rather than having your artists need to understand each part of the render engine, all they really need to understand is samples.
Essentially, arnold is very good in a situation where you want to aleviate a lot of the tech from your artists so that they can focus on their art and you can throw a couple render machines at the work to just brute force the render instead.
pretty much, your artists can stop being TDs like renderman or even mental ray sometimes/often require and focus on just the task at hand.
If this reel shows anything, other than Arnold which is a fantastic engine, it’s how much F’in work Digic has done in the last year or two.
Seriously, for a shop that size mostly living in the cinematic niche they have an insane amount of clips in there.
My respect to both, Marcos and his team and the Digic guys for what they squeeze out of Arnold on what I must assume are some intense deadlines.
i hear their new raytraced SSS and volume rendering is very fast. i wonder how they optimized raytraced sss. MIS inside SSS?
Hey, thanks a lot!
Yes we have some serious deadlines and we did release 4 movies this year already (AC4 announcement and E3 trailer, Watchdogs E3 trailer and the AMD Be Invincible commercial) although we’ve actually been working on these for a while.
We’re also not that small anymore, about 110+ people counting office staff.
As for why they included so many different clips, you’ll have to ask Marcos 
(personally I think they added some visual variety with the various scifi and historical settings)
i have no experience creating rendering software. but wasnt it obvious for 5 years to use some type of mis for sss? i took so long. are there any patents ?
I had heard of the 100 mark. That’s why you now get referred to as of that size, and not a boutique any longer 
I’ll have to visit one of these days!
Cool, I’ve had no idea that some shots from the movie I used to work on made into the showreel
None in this business have been immune from the support of artists all around but enough is enough. This whole business is falling apart because of accessibility. I think 5 licenses actually is a bit low but I like their (Solid Angle) thinking, and The Foundry aren’t that far behind.
Maybe this is just a rumor but Solid Angle only sell to studios in Europe and NA right? And I think since most jobs are created in those areas it’s only fair. We should also encourage companies to only supports local studios, maybe even build a law around it, or make it too expensive for individuals, small studios or others who can’t afford or doesn’t live in a certain area to be part of that market.
So hopefully Solid Angle keep supporting us non contributors (LOL!) because I can’t imagine that they ever got anything useful from the artist community.
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