JSplacement is a rather cool pseudo-random 8k displacement map generator made with JavaScript. It generates grayscale height maps that can be used for displacement. Below are some tests using Arnold.
The image below required a higher than normal number of Subdiv Iterations (9) to capture the fine detail from the generated displacement map.
Here is a tutorial that covers how to render a car model in an automotive studio environment using Arnold.
Pingo has created a 3D Jewellery Visualization course that uses Arnold for C4D, with over 5 hours of material in 20 lessons.
Arnold 5: (AlShaders2): https://github.com/anderslanglands/alShaders2/releases
Nuke and Fusion: https://github.com/Psyop/Cryptomatte
Arnold 5 Cryptomatte
Cryptomatte for Arnold 5 is being released as part of AlShaders, as before, but is now a standalone node. Arnold 5.0.1 adds support for “AOV shaders”, which allow code to run on all materials in a scene, without manually connecting passthrough nodes. This improves the workflow in numerous ways. Using a central AOV shader node gives easy access to global Cryptomatte settings (on the one central Cryptomatte node). It is now also much easier for a studio to create a customized version of Cryptomatte, since the code does not need to be embedded in a surface shader. In addition to adopting the AOV shader methodology, we’ve added other features as well, such as sidecar manifests that work with deferred-loaded stand-ins, and “integer offsets” for modifying names.
Arnold 5 Documentation: Cryptomatte documentation, MtoA, MAXtoA, C4DtoA, HtoA.
Quixel have an impressive library of scanned assets available for rendering with Arnold. Below is a test render using one of their wood stump assets.
Some free HDR maps can be downloaded from the websites below:
http://www.maximeroz.com/hdri/
Arnold 5.01 is now available. Release notes (MtoA) here.
Some of the enhancements include:
Pingo has a collection of realistic HDR Studio Lights with some free samples available for download. These would be ideal for connecting to the color attribute of an Arnold light such as Quad or Disk to give realistic color and reflections.
An introduction with some basic concepts and explanations around OCIO config and synColor config files has been added to the MtoA (2017) user guide in the links below.
Skin shading is very simple using the Standard Surface shader in Arnold 5. From the Arnold user guide:
Below is a an example of such a skin shading setup (digital Emily files can be downloaded here).
Arvid Schneider has created a video that goes through the skin shading process:
