Global illumination rendering software

What’s new in Autodesk Arnold

Autodesk Arnold introduces enhanced rendering performance, improved shading capabilities and expanded pipeline workflows to help artists produce high-quality, production-ready renders more efficiently.

Improved rendering performance

GPU and CPU consistency

Enhanced shading and lighting

Advanced volume rendering

MIKKTSpace normal mapping

Pipeline and USD enhancements

Cloud and distributed rendering

Workflow and system improvements

Render colourful, life-like results you can’t take your eyes off of

Autodesk Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer trusted by studios in film, television and games to deliver beautiful and predictable results with full artistic control.

Create cinematic, production-ready visuals with interactive rendering directly in Maya and 3ds Max, allowing you to refine characters, environments and lighting without breaking creative flow. Seamlessly switch between CPU and GPU rendering to match your production demands while confidently managing complex scenes, heavy data sets and detailed assets.

With an open and extensible architecture, Arnold integrates easily into leading 3D content creation tools, supporting scalable pipelines and custom workflows for modern content production.

Outcomes Arnold helps you achieve

Make your next project come to life with Arnold

Bring greater depth, realism and efficiency to your productions with advanced shading, lighting and rendering capabilities in Autodesk Arnold.

Create powerful procedural effects with flexible shader tools, achieve cleaner results with improved light sampling and benefit from high-quality geometry processing for more accurate renders. Enhanced USD and MaterialX support strengthens pipeline integration, while performance optimisations across shading, textures and volumetrics help accelerate complex workflows.

With continued refinements across major DCC applications including Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D and Katana, Arnold delivers the reliability, scalability and control required for modern film, animation, VFX and game production.

Distance shader: A new distance shader that uses the distance to the nearest surface to interpolate between near and far colour values. (ARNOLD-9361)

Optimised performance across platforms

Arnold provides native support for Apple silicon, delivering improved rendering performance and efficiency on Mac-based production environments. Universal binaries ensure smooth integration within Maya, helping artists take full advantage of modern hardware.

Advanced colour management in 3ds Max

Maintain predictable and consistent colour throughout your pipeline with robust OpenColorIO support in Arnold for 3ds Max. Define rendering spaces, customise view transforms and control input colour spaces to ensure accurate results across assets, lighting and final output.

Enhanced USD workflows

Work confidently with complex and data-heavy scenes through continued support for USD workflows. Arnold integrates with USD pipelines, including Hydra render delegation and MaterialX displacement, enabling scalable collaboration across teams and tools.

Smarter texture handling

Automatically generate optimised TX textures as part of the rendering process to improve performance and reduce memory usage. Built-in texture optimisation helps accelerate rendering without requiring dedicated preprocessing workflows.

Performance and usability enhancements

Benefit from ongoing improvements to rendering speed, scene updates and API behaviour. From autobump handling to general workflow refinements, Arnold is engineered to help studios render efficiently and reliably in production environments.