Very excited to see Arnold for 3ds Max (MAXtoA) announced at Siggraph 2016.

It is available for download here. The user guide can be found here.

Some more information about the release can be found on the 3ds Max Blog on the area website.

Below is a video that I contributed to that shows some of Arnold’s functionality in 3ds Max.

I discovered recently (purely by accident), that you can get some pretty convincing refractive caustics using just the Sky shader.

Previously, I was under the impression that they could only be achieved using an emissive shader. However, using a HDR map with some high dynamic areas like a window or sun can give you some impressive results.

Tutorials here: MtoA, C4DtoA.

Autodesk Japan have made available the models used in the movie below from WOW inc.

‘Max Man’ and ‘Maya Man’ are made available free of charge for use within the software applications.

Below are Arnold renders of each model.

Gametextures.com have some impressive high resolution texture maps, including color, specular, normal, gloss and displacement among others. Below is a render of ‘Muddy Dirt Road’ with displacement and 6 subdivision iterations in Arnold.

Inlifethrill have released an impressive, high quality video tutorial course on Mastering Arnold Renderer for CINEMA 4D.

Snaptank have made an excellent high resolution alien scan freely available on their site. A great making of the scanning process can be found here. Below is an image of the scan rendered with Arnold (more here).

Here are a series of tutorials aimed at mental ray users who are using Arnold for Maya for the first time. The tutorials are based on the Hyperspace Madness production over on the Autodesk Area site. You will have to download the assets from this site before starting the tutorials. I recommend downloading the assets as they are a great learning resource to have.

Saber Jlassi has produced some excellent video tutorials about volume rendering with HtoA.

Here are some awesome metal material studies using the Standard shader in Arnold for Houdini by Jarrod Hasenjager.

A guide to understanding physically based rendering in Arnold can be found in the user guides for each plugin below:

MtoA    SItoA    HtoA    C4DtoA    KtoA