Affiliation:
1. Solid Angle, Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Arnold is a physically based renderer for feature-length animation and visual effects. Conceived in an era of complex multi-pass rasterization-based workflows struggling to keep up with growing demands for complexity and realism, Arnold was created to take on the challenge of making the simple and elegant approach of brute-force Monte Carlo path tracing practical for production rendering. Achieving this required building a robust piece of ray-tracing software that can ingest large amounts of geometry with detailed shading and lighting and produce images with high fidelity, while scaling well with the available memory and processing power.
Arnold’s guiding principles are to expose as few controls as possible, provide rapid feedback to artists, and adapt to various production workflows. In this article, we describe its architecture with a focus on the design and implementation choices made during its evolutionary development to meet the aforementioned requirements and goals. Arnold’s workhorse is a unidirectional path tracer that avoids the use of hard-to-manage and artifact-prone caching and sits on top of a ray-tracing engine optimized to shoot and shade billions of spatially incoherent rays throughout a scene. A comprehensive API provides the means to configure and extend the system’s functionality, to describe a scene, render it, and save the results.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
Cited by
32 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献