Arnold Subscription has been announced.

For questions and all the details on Arnold subscription, please see the Arnold Subscription FAQ.

More information is available on the Autodesk Area website.

Below are some interesting real world lighting techniques that are applicable to lighting and rendering with Arnold.

Xuan Prada has made available a couple of lighting rigs. They are setup for MtoA, however, the HDRIs could be used for other Arnold plugins too.

Look Development Light-rig 0001 for Arnold

Look Development Light-rig 0002 for Arnold

Pluralsight have a course on studio lighting techniques with Maya and Arnold by Simon Brown.

Course overview video.

fxphd have a new course on transitioning from Mental Ray to Arnold.

Arvid Schneider has created an introduction to the new Standard Surface shader in Arnold 5 for Maya. It is still worth watching if you are using other Arnold plugins as the terminology is the same.

Arvid has created some excellent Arnold videos. You can support him on his Patreon page.

A short tutorial on how to create a motion graphic effect using color shaders can be found below.

MtoA     C4DtoA     MAXtoA     HtoA

Reflection Lines is a useful Color Mode found within the Utility shader. It can be used to diagnose contour lines in a mesh when evaluating models.

This sort of shading is especially useful when modeling cars where surface evaluation is critical. Below is an example where it has identified some poor modeling in the hood of a car model.

Some more random examples below:

New to Arnold for 3ds Max? Below are some useful links to get you up to speed.

Changes to Rendering in 3ds Max 2018. More information can be found on the Area website (essential reading).

The MAXtoA user guide can be found here (if you spot any errors, please email docs@solidangle.com).

I recommend the Rendering Your First Scene page to get you started.

There are some tutorials here (more incoming in the future).

A basic material library can be found here.

The Learning Scenes are a good place for experimenting with rendering different features with Arnold.

The version of MAXtoA that ships with 3ds Max 2018 is already out of date. You can get the latest MAXtoA release here.

An introduction to Arnold 5 video for 3dsMax 2018 can be found below.

A 4-part (4 video) tutorial on the 3ds Max youtube learning channel on Arnold in MAXtoA:

More here.