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In 2004, Fajardo entered a licensing and co-development agreement with Sony Pictures Imageworks, which resulted in separate branches for the commercial and proprietary versions of Arnold. The name Arnold emerged when one of Fajardo's friends suggested it after mocking an Arnold Schwarzenegger film they saw in a theater. That year, he attended SIGGRAPH, where his interest in stochastic ray tracing (a foundational part of Arnold's rendering technology) was piqued in discussions with friends attending the conference.Įarly versions of Fajardo's renderer were called RenderAPI. The beginnings of what is now Arnold emerged in 1997 when Fajardo decided to write his own renderer. Marcos Fajardo is the chief architect of Arnold. Marcos Fajardo at SIGGRAPH 2013 in Anaheim, CA Throughout the 2010s, its team published research that popularized the use of solid angle-based sampling of area lights in production rendering, the use of equi-angular sampling for volumetric scattering, the use of ray-traced sub-surface scattering, and the use of blue-noise dithered sampling. Īrnold is based on the Monte Carlo Path Tracing algorithm, making extensive use of importance sampling and other numerical techniques to improve the quality of rendered images. It has a fully programmable API, and uses shaders written in C++ or Open Shading Language to define the materials and textures. It can render large numbers of high-resolution texture maps thanks to its integration of the OpenImageIO library. For complex scenes such as the space station in Elysium, it makes heavy use of geometry instancing, which helps it render trillions of visible polygons in a reasonable amount of memory. It often uses multiple levels of diffuse and specular inter-reflection so that light can bounce off of a wall or other object and indirectly illuminate a subject. Its ray tracing engine is optimized to send billions of spatially incoherent rays throughout a 3D scene composed of geometric primitives including polygons, hair splines, and volumes. Since March 2019 it supports Nvidia RTX-powered GPUs through the use of OptiX. Originally written in C99 and progressively rewritten in C++, Arnold runs natively on x86 CPUs, where it tries to take advantage of all available threads and SIMD lanes for optimal parallelism.
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Notable television series include Game of Thrones, Westworld, Trollhunters, LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS and The Mandalorian. Notable feature films that have used Arnold include Monster House, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Alice in Wonderland, Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class, The Avengers, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Elysium, Pacific Rim, Gravity, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Created in Spain by Marcos Fajardo and later co-developed by his company Solid Angle SL (now owned by Autodesk) and Sony Pictures Imageworks, Arnold is one of the most widely used photorealistic rendering systems in computer graphics worldwide in 2021, specially in animation and VFX for film and TV.
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Arnold is a computer program for rendering three-dimensional, computer-generated scenes using unbiased, physically-based, Monte Carlo path tracing techniques.
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