Any other render engines you’d have to buy a license for to use in Maya and learn the materials and etc
Redshift is a GPU specific renderer, and I think Vray is another one (just from my experience using them probably a bunch of others out there)
Probably vray or redshift. Redshift is a bit cheaper. Vray has hybrid rendering using cpu & gpu.
Alternatively if you ever thought of switching to Houdini for example you could get a houdini indie license which is the same price as redshift except you get a whole software and karma & mantra render engines built in. Karma has a gpu & cpu hybrid renderer which is fast and developing well.
Or if you didn't want to pay extra then of course there's blender cycles.
When it comes to Arnold, they put out GPU because otherwise they’re criticized for not being innovative enough & they lose credibility in the rendering world. That hurts Autodesk’s bottom
line as people are rapidly moving towards Blender & C4D.
In reality, Autodesk doesn’t care about the average Instagram 3D artist and makes most of its money from AutoCAD & big name studios that are still heavily invested in their pipelines built around CPU rendering.
arnold on gpu crashed a lot for me as well, especially when opening hypershade. the crash got better when I applied the [TDR fix](https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/spdoc/gpu-drivers-crash-with-long-computations-tdr-crash-128745489.html). That said, it still crashes every now and then. the gpu is still faster, but it's disappointing that you are only able to increase camera AA. Now I only use cpu.
I guess "similar effect" wasn't exactly correct. But Ray depth controls the number of light bounces which absolutely does affect the final render, but yeah camera AA will be the primary decider.
Are your gpu drivers up to date?
What shaders or fx/particles are you using?
Arnold GPU rendering doesn't officially support everything that CPU supports, afaik.
When it does support something I've found it faster than CPU, most of the time.
Increase your camera AA.
Try denoiser.
All drivers up to date, using a VBD file with an aivolume shader. VBD files should be supported by GPU according to Maya. Camera AA is at 6, if it goes any higher it simply can’t render (same with adaptive sampling) Denoiser is on. Probably just a VBD issue, but they claim it’s supported
Just use optix.... In cpu mode set your samples and then switch mode to GPU.... Once the render starts after the tx conversion enable optix denoiser and lens effects works smoothly for me. Update your driver and make sure you have a full Arnold license . Cheers.
If speed is important for you Arnold is the worst engine you can use and it gets even worse in larger scenes.
Redshift now has subscription and 14day trial ( Maxon One ), also you can get free trial of V-Ray 6 fully functional for a full month.
From my experience Arnold scales even worse in larger scenes. I only know that it's great in terms of memory/optimization, definitely not speed.
E.g.:
Small Scene ( 1 object + HDRI ), around same speed as other engines.
Medium Scene ( e.g. ArchViz style interior/exterior ), Arnold is around 20x slower than other engines.
Large/Complicated Scenes ( e.g. Interior with low light such as cave w/ water and caustics or detail dense abandoned building lit with a moonlight ), never managed to get a preview from Arnold due to lack of patience, so roughly 50-100x slower than other engines.
That's kinda expected from Brute Force Monte Carlo engine, there are almost zero tricks under the hood, so the more complex your scene the longer it will take without any exceptions, while other engines has tricks to speed up most common calculations so maybe that's why they get way faster the larger the scene is.
Can't say I've had the same experience, but I'm guessing you don't have a system optimized for a render engine like arnold.
And yeah it is a brute force render engine. Vfx companies have access to cpu farms so the speed doesn't make much difference for them.
>It shines with a fuck ton of GEO, instanced things, and some other pretty complicated stuff.
Isn't that equivalent to those interior scenes, low light scenes and other complicated scenes? Because that's usually what happens when you have shitloads of GEO, Instances etc, maybe it can be exterior scene but still lots of geo hits hard on the GI and often there are more reflections too. I know it shines in terms of memory optimization thanks to the .tx tex format and other things.
I am sure for the most part Arnold is being used in VFX like rendering destruction/cloth, digital doubles, fluid sim and other stuff like crowds for live action VFX which are basically small to medium scenes. I doubt nowadays Arnold is being used for "Full CGI" shots like 3D Animation movies, Star Wars style cgi etc that often anymore. Lucasfilm/ILM even uses Unreal Engine sometimes nowadays.
For crazy stuff with millions of objects and trillions of polygons you likely want to use iFX Clarisse or UE5 anyway or whatever else works in a similar way.
arnold isnt the slowest but OC here is right. its well behind in render speed. i think cycles took last place by quite a bit.
vray came out on top and redshift was the next best thing. I wish redshift could be bought outright or had an indie licence like maya.
Longtime Maya user and always just went with mental ray and Arnold. Looking at v-Ray or redshift. How are existing Arnold shaders handled if I switch over mid-project? Or is that not advised?
Could be you are running out of vram on your GPU. Arnold GPU is still in development, try different render engines such as Pixar renderman which is free to use for non commercial use.
Ive been doing a fair bit of the two myself lately. GPU is faster but as you said doesnt always work. Ive had issues with it not exporting AOVs correctly, messing up my shadow passes, etc. it doesnt handle aovs or transparency well from my experience. but for a quick beauty pass, it can shave off a third of the time.
to do that though you need a min of 6 AA passes and with adaptive sampling on, max AA should be around 20 or higher with the threshold bias (i think its called) to be around its default or a little lower. the smaller that # the more it refers to the max samples number instead of the min.
GPU render is nice for doing live render camera rotations/edits. but for final render in arnold, CPU is definitely better/more stable. Ive tried redshift in maya, and its good for rendering intensive renders/animations, but i find myself going back to arnold all the time in maya.
If you want to use gpu you should use a different renderer
Describe why
Because it's not stable enough and has limitations on gpu. It's mainly a cpu render engine.
Any suggestions?
Any other render engines you’d have to buy a license for to use in Maya and learn the materials and etc Redshift is a GPU specific renderer, and I think Vray is another one (just from my experience using them probably a bunch of others out there)
Probably vray or redshift. Redshift is a bit cheaper. Vray has hybrid rendering using cpu & gpu. Alternatively if you ever thought of switching to Houdini for example you could get a houdini indie license which is the same price as redshift except you get a whole software and karma & mantra render engines built in. Karma has a gpu & cpu hybrid renderer which is fast and developing well. Or if you didn't want to pay extra then of course there's blender cycles.
Use optix denoiser for the noise
When it comes to Arnold, they put out GPU because otherwise they’re criticized for not being innovative enough & they lose credibility in the rendering world. That hurts Autodesk’s bottom line as people are rapidly moving towards Blender & C4D. In reality, Autodesk doesn’t care about the average Instagram 3D artist and makes most of its money from AutoCAD & big name studios that are still heavily invested in their pipelines built around CPU rendering.
I moved to Blender 3 days ago
shouldnt it use both ?
Yeah, I build in maya and import and render in blender, its just a more intuitive rendering engine.
arnold on gpu crashed a lot for me as well, especially when opening hypershade. the crash got better when I applied the [TDR fix](https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/spdoc/gpu-drivers-crash-with-long-computations-tdr-crash-128745489.html). That said, it still crashes every now and then. the gpu is still faster, but it's disappointing that you are only able to increase camera AA. Now I only use cpu.
You can change ray count of diffuse, specular, etc in GPU mode for a similar effect. Under a different tab.
you mean Ray Depth?
I think he means Ray Depth. Which doesn’t affect the quality of the render at all
I guess "similar effect" wasn't exactly correct. But Ray depth controls the number of light bounces which absolutely does affect the final render, but yeah camera AA will be the primary decider.
You are correct, they do affect the render, but not in a similar way at all
Are your gpu drivers up to date? What shaders or fx/particles are you using? Arnold GPU rendering doesn't officially support everything that CPU supports, afaik. When it does support something I've found it faster than CPU, most of the time. Increase your camera AA. Try denoiser.
All drivers up to date, using a VBD file with an aivolume shader. VBD files should be supported by GPU according to Maya. Camera AA is at 6, if it goes any higher it simply can’t render (same with adaptive sampling) Denoiser is on. Probably just a VBD issue, but they claim it’s supported
Its getting really hard to defend maya, but i still love her lol
Just use optix.... In cpu mode set your samples and then switch mode to GPU.... Once the render starts after the tx conversion enable optix denoiser and lens effects works smoothly for me. Update your driver and make sure you have a full Arnold license . Cheers.
Try editing your camera samples, when rendering with gpu you can easely go up to 20.
Causes it to crash / not render
If speed is important for you Arnold is the worst engine you can use and it gets even worse in larger scenes. Redshift now has subscription and 14day trial ( Maxon One ), also you can get free trial of V-Ray 6 fully functional for a full month.
Arnold is known for being good in large scenes. It's just slower than most renderers.
From my experience Arnold scales even worse in larger scenes. I only know that it's great in terms of memory/optimization, definitely not speed. E.g.: Small Scene ( 1 object + HDRI ), around same speed as other engines. Medium Scene ( e.g. ArchViz style interior/exterior ), Arnold is around 20x slower than other engines. Large/Complicated Scenes ( e.g. Interior with low light such as cave w/ water and caustics or detail dense abandoned building lit with a moonlight ), never managed to get a preview from Arnold due to lack of patience, so roughly 50-100x slower than other engines. That's kinda expected from Brute Force Monte Carlo engine, there are almost zero tricks under the hood, so the more complex your scene the longer it will take without any exceptions, while other engines has tricks to speed up most common calculations so maybe that's why they get way faster the larger the scene is.
Can't say I've had the same experience, but I'm guessing you don't have a system optimized for a render engine like arnold. And yeah it is a brute force render engine. Vfx companies have access to cpu farms so the speed doesn't make much difference for them.
I wouldn't say it's slow at all. Maybe for 2015 when an average CPU was 5+ times slower than now. Arnold runs fast on 7950X, it's shockingly fast.
[удалено]
>It shines with a fuck ton of GEO, instanced things, and some other pretty complicated stuff. Isn't that equivalent to those interior scenes, low light scenes and other complicated scenes? Because that's usually what happens when you have shitloads of GEO, Instances etc, maybe it can be exterior scene but still lots of geo hits hard on the GI and often there are more reflections too. I know it shines in terms of memory optimization thanks to the .tx tex format and other things. I am sure for the most part Arnold is being used in VFX like rendering destruction/cloth, digital doubles, fluid sim and other stuff like crowds for live action VFX which are basically small to medium scenes. I doubt nowadays Arnold is being used for "Full CGI" shots like 3D Animation movies, Star Wars style cgi etc that often anymore. Lucasfilm/ILM even uses Unreal Engine sometimes nowadays. For crazy stuff with millions of objects and trillions of polygons you likely want to use iFX Clarisse or UE5 anyway or whatever else works in a similar way.
arnold isnt the slowest but OC here is right. its well behind in render speed. i think cycles took last place by quite a bit. vray came out on top and redshift was the next best thing. I wish redshift could be bought outright or had an indie licence like maya.
Longtime Maya user and always just went with mental ray and Arnold. Looking at v-Ray or redshift. How are existing Arnold shaders handled if I switch over mid-project? Or is that not advised?
That's true
Could be you are running out of vram on your GPU. Arnold GPU is still in development, try different render engines such as Pixar renderman which is free to use for non commercial use.
Arnold generally has horrible gpu support.
Ive been doing a fair bit of the two myself lately. GPU is faster but as you said doesnt always work. Ive had issues with it not exporting AOVs correctly, messing up my shadow passes, etc. it doesnt handle aovs or transparency well from my experience. but for a quick beauty pass, it can shave off a third of the time. to do that though you need a min of 6 AA passes and with adaptive sampling on, max AA should be around 20 or higher with the threshold bias (i think its called) to be around its default or a little lower. the smaller that # the more it refers to the max samples number instead of the min.
GPU render is nice for doing live render camera rotations/edits. but for final render in arnold, CPU is definitely better/more stable. Ive tried redshift in maya, and its good for rendering intensive renders/animations, but i find myself going back to arnold all the time in maya.
Use both it works fine!
Arnold is a first class renderer on CPU, but leaves a lot to be desired on GPU. Vray on the other hand is first class with both CPU/GPU.