Original author(s) Type Rendering system | Developer(s) Solid Angle | |
 | ||
Operating system License Proprietary commercial software Website www.solidangle.com/arnold/ | ||
Arnold is an unbiased, physically based, ray tracing 3D rendering application created by the company Solid Angle. Notable 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, Red Tails, Underworld: Awakening, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Elysium, Pacific Rim and Gravity.
Contents
Technology
Arnold is based on Monte Carlo Ray Tracing. Thus its engine is optimized to send billions of spatially incoherent rays throughout a scene. It often uses one level of diffuse inter-reflection so that light can bounce off of a wall or other object and indirectly illuminate a subject. For complex scenes such as the space station in Elysium, it makes heavy use of instancing. It uses the Open Shading Language to define the materials and textures.
History
Marcos Fajardo is the chief architect of Arnold. The beginnings of what is now Arnold emerged in 1997 when Fajardo decided to write his own renderer. 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.
Early versions of Fajardo's renderer were called RenderAPI. The name Arnold emerged when one of Fajardo's friends suggested it after mocking an Arnold Schwarzenegger film they saw in a theater.
Solid Angle, the company behind Arnold, was purchased by Autodesk in early 2016. The acquisition was announced officially on April 18, 2016.
On 4 January 2017, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Fajardo with a Scientific and Engineering award (Academy plaque) for "the creative vision and original implementation of the Arnold Renderer."