Is Arnold coming to Blender?
There was an update at GitHub repository 8 days ago.
It says it’s coming this year with Blender 2.91 release. Does anyone has any insight on this?
Exiting news if true!
More choice in renderers for Blender users is always good, and Arnold is a very competent renderer. I personally don’t expect to use it. I love Cycles, and if I want to push realism to the edge, I use the free and fabulous LuxCoreRender.
Pretty much the same here. I use E-Cycles and when I want extra realism I go for LuxCore.
Still, I’d love to see more production proven renders to be available for Blender. I’ll definitely check out Arnold when and if it’s available.
Looks like it might happen soon.
the project is dead and they have moved on to work on some kind of dcc the devs said…too frustrated,hope somone else will work something out so that we can have arnold plugin working for latest blender version
Yeah, saw this too. It seems… I don’t have words for this. A wasted opportunity? They worked on this for two years and then abandon it shortly after they promised it’s production ready and they want to build their studio pipeline around it. I have too many questions with this situation but I think they either overpromised (lied) about the status of the project or they are terrible with delivering final product.
I wish them the best but I have very little faith in their new project which they began hyping as much as Arnold for Blender.
Renderman fan here. Though I do like Arnold. But Renderman for Blender is definitely back on track.
http://www.cgchannel.com/2020/09/blender-to-get-official-renderman-plugin/
Availability and system requirements
RenderMan 24 is due for release in “Q1 2021” for Windows 10, CentOS/RHEL 7.x Linux and macOS 10.14+. RenderMan XPU and the RenderMan for Blender plugin will ship with version 24.
same here…they claimed they can give away the source code for free…if they couldn’t deliver Arnold plugin, you shouldn’t have hopes on their dcc.Blender is developing at a very high rate. I guess they couldn’t keep up the pace, and also that why the excuse of RNA came,i guess this usd thing is overhyped
I also think many guys who joined the discord were there because of Arnold not the Dcc…chances are the discord wil be dead after the news are recieved
eagerly waiting for the release,its a good thing we have some hopes on this one…pixar rarely fails to deliver
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Yeah, I think a lot of us were there for Arnold. It felt really ingenuine for them to be pushing a Barnold release for as long as they did (as recently as like last week), then coming out and just saying “it doesn’t matter, we’re not releasing it, this is about our new thing now.” So I have very little confidence they’ll deliver anything at the moment.
I’m going to try my own hand at a BtoA Arnold plugin. I use Arnold at work, and Blender is our DCC. Right now we’re piping everything through Gaffer to render with Arnold but it’s overkill for a lot of smaller projects. It’d be nice to just be able to hit render and let it go, even if it’s not a 100% true integration like Cycles is. If anyone is interested shoot me a message - once I get some code going I’ll post a public repo and just do development out in the open so people can test and try it out as I go. I’m not going to make any guarantees but I’d like to see it happen so I’m going to give it a try myself.
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I immediately left the Discord. No point following now. I saw the pattern of promise and failed delivery way to many times from them in a short span of time. I had some hopes but not too many after they failed their 100% delivery date at Dec 31st I lost mostly all interest. Now it’s dead.
I wish i was good at coding,could have given you my support…but anyway goodluck…
on addition i gues there was a working version of th plugin…based on blender 2.79,you can try porting it to blender 2.9…here is the link https://github.com/noxman/btoa
it is based on Arnold 5,so you might wanna change it to be based on Arnold 6.1
it didn’t work with textures/no node system,but the ipr was working
if you cant deliver just don’t promise…simply say am trying…i wish they made it as a paid plugin…i could have paid for it…but fake promises its not the way to go
if working on a simple integration is that hard for them, do you think delivering some DCC that will conquer all the other main stream Dccs is easy? …they will simply say the project is dead
No worries, you’re welcome to help test! The next week or so will probably just be research and basic testing. I also forked the old repo from the guys that just dropped the project so I can see what they did before they closed the source in 2019.
And I agree, there was a LOT of promising and getting people excited with zero follow through. They were never really transparent about progress throughout the entire process. I might not make the most amazing thing ever either, but you can all watch me fail trying. 
I did the same thing. I was even skeptical of the 31st release date, and although I was disappointed when they missed it I honestly wasn’t surprised. It’s too bad. They seem like they have a lot of potential, but they desperately need to work on their community management and PR.
will be glad to see yours working…i guess if you become transparent…all kind of support will come your way…thats the best thing of opensource…and also we have guys like Elon musk And Ton(blender) because they tried…not because they were perfect with what they were doing or trying to do…just keep on trying…thats what i always believe in
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AMD AND Pixar are working on making Blender Hydra delegate compatible.
Correct me if I am wrong but as soon as that works the door is open for any Hydra delegate Renderer.
Arnold is a Hydra delegate Renderer. So is Vray, and Redshift. Renderman obviously was the first, Pro Render is soon to follow.
Yes, that’s true. This was recently announced - I need to look into it further. Super cool development though.
Theoretically, yes. How well it’ll be implemented is yet to be seen. I’m not a programmer to judge this part so I won’t make any theories. Yet I tested early alpha Hydra delegate in Blender and interaction was very slow.
As far as I understand the success of this will depend on how well Blender supports USD. I hope they’ll do a full USD support and make it a priority format. Because as far as I understand it now the streaming of data between blender and USD is a narrow place.
Again, not a programmer. Could be really wrong here. But it’s what I gathered from a number of conversations.
If it’s implemented in a way we don’t have any slow down with Hydra that will be amazing because we’ll be able to use any render engine that has USD delegate in Blender. Arnold already has it and it’s almost feature complete as far as I know:
It’s still is a bit of a distant future when we’ll be able to benefit from USD I think. But the active development is happening.
Yeah, I think the Pixar guys know what they are doing, which is the best possible option for Blender (having those who initially developed it working on the port for Blender)
The Pixar team is working on a display driver(?) that directly injects itself into Blender using C, they also plan to make that open source, so I guess that is the fast way needed to make it feasible.
They are? I didn’t know that someone from Pixar working on implementing USD in Blender. Where can I learn about it?
Yeah, I heard about it from one of their presentation. This sounded amazing because other developers could use it as well since it was planned to be open source.