www.fxphd.com is running a class on Arnold right now. As part of the class you get access to Arnold itself. It’s not cheap, but it’s FAR cheaper and easier to get than a traditional Arnold license, and I know some people around here have been desperately looking for a legitimate way to get their hands on the renderer. Obviously it requires access to SoftImage (not sure if MtoA is included or not). Anyway, maybe some of you can take advantage of this opportunity. Enjoy!
arnold must have alot of boogers on it, they dont want anyone playing with it an criticizing it.
Bad PR hurts sales, they need to control the flow.
whats the point of making a product, then not allowing people to use it?
or limiting it… must be some sort of smug elitist thing that i don’t understand.
That’s incredibly ignorant to say. No one who has used Arnold in production (myself included) has anything bad to say about it. In fact, it’s completely changed the way that I and the business I work for work for the better. We’ve never had such a great turnaround rate. Solid Angle is a total of 16 people. They simply don’t have the manpower required to sell individual licences and provide support to thousands of people with different problems and needs. There are already nearly 100 studios, including Sony, using Arnold to complete jobs every day. There are shining examples of what it can produce that you can watch all over the place. To the people making the decisions, there’s nothing for them to prove. It’s just a matter of studios willing to take the plunge in switching from a REYES pipeline at this point, and in my opinion it’s silly not to.
why no Demo versions?
Why does the SolidAngle website suck?
buy it, before you try it…
no need to read it…
You have to vote on it first, then you will find out later whats in it.
search for “Arnold Render Demo” on yahoo and you can find some…
LOL looks like the pirates are out in force. viruses are running wild i bet.
I have to say that I hate the way is doing Arnold, you said that they’re only 16 people but they’re selling to major studios, that’s a little bit contradictory, if they sell to big studios they should have big incomes as well (and if they’re only 16 people they will have also low outcomes in general) so they could hire more people to provide extra support to other companies (medium and small studios maybe) or at least to pay a webmaster LOL.
I think the best way to go should be something like Octane, which they offer a good price for the beta versions and a more standard price once it was released the final version. There’s too much mistery arround Arnold and that sucks for sure.
Why spend money on tech support when you can make a decent chunk of change off of big studios and funnel it all into R&D, plus have a sweet parallel development deal with Sony at the same time? As far as website goes, just because you can’t see the whole website doesn’t mean it’s not there. (HINT: the Solid Angle home page is NOT the whole Solid Angle website. Try going to arnoldpedia.solidangle.com.) Octane’s release was a mess, with the creator too proud to admit it. It was a huge money sink because of the way he decided to do things.
Hobbyists, sadly, are not where the money is. Marcos and SA know what they’re doing, they’ve been in the game for a VERY long time. The only people who think it’s some kind of mysterious vaporware are those who haven’t done their research.
like i said, elitist additide stuff.
we render a cube better than you…
our farts smell better than yours. (Kinda like walking into an apple store)
i really have no interest in trying arnold since the platform to run it on alone,
costs 4x more than my computer.(NOT including arnold itself)
Then you’re not the intended audience. Most people without access to a group of high-end CPUs or renderfarm wouldn’t get much mileage out of it anyway. The savings are in setup and artist time, not render time, although there are things it does faster than the REYES equivalent. SA knows this, and I’m sure it factors into the reasoning behind the limited release. Believe it or not, there ARE those of us on the Blender forums who do this professionally and have access to commercial tech and hardware. This is for them. The title of the thread was not “come and tell us how you think Arnold is dumb because you can’t afford it”. The cost for an Arnold license pays for itself in less than a month for a studio with regular work, or even a freelancer. The cost is a non-issue for anyone who takes fast rendering seriously.
Another option would be Messiah, which keeps offering deals. It has the Arnold renderer built in – although, admittedly it is a fork. Still, a lot of the benefits of Arnold for cheap…
Arnold is not for hobbyists but professionals.
Professionals have other resources to A) get information about a product and B) solve technical problems.
I used a 10.000$ Real Time Render engine and you need to ask for a demo - they don’t give it to everybody
and this way make sure they focus only on real possible clients and not just hobbyists!
It is not everywhere like at GoDaddy.
and makes money through doing 3D !
Chant* “Cycles is better… cycles is better…” ommmm…
(plug my ears)
I’d rather have Maxwell Render, anyhow since it has a Blender plugin. 
Why support them when they don’t care about what we use?
Limiting yourself to just Blender is like trying to build a house with just a hammer. Blender is great for many things. It is not great for many other things. As an artist on a deadline you don’t have time to say “I’m going to use package ‘a’ to do function ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’ even though it will take an extra 6 hours more than if I use package ‘b’ too.”
Just for the record, Maxwell cares just as much about Blender as Solid Angle. The only reason there’s an exporter is because someone else wrote one. In fact, I’d say they care even less. The creator of Arnold comments openly on this forum and gives advice for Cycles. I don’t think the same can be said about any other commercial renderer…
at least i have been able to try a demo of Maxwell for free.
and it $350 dollars cheaper than vray.
its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy if you distribute demo versions
(even standalone ones) , then maybe you will get someone that will create exporters
for your products for different packages and you can quit complaining about
“oh we only have 16 people”
if you have nothing to show,
nobody is going to buy.
i have some Ocean front property in Arizona wanna buy it?
dude, seriously, you should probably stop talking. 
why reply to the thread if all you have to say regarding the original post is negative or disinterested? there’s a word for that on forums 
At this point you’re just trolling, and you keep proving that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Every copy of Arnold comes with a standalone. It’s called kick. They don’t want anyone else to work on exporters, they want to develop them in house so that they are as integrated as possible. No one is complaining that they have a small staff. They don’t want to hire a hundred people to run tech coverage for them. It’s a business decision. Those 16 people are making far above the average for a software engineer in their field. If you truly think that no one is buying Arnold, then you’re just being willfully ignorant. There isn’t a large studio out there who isn’t running Arnold at least in testing already. ILM is in the process of adjusting their entire workflow to use Arnold in future productions. Even Disney is researching it, which Pixar is none too happy about. Large software suites like Katana are already rewritten to accommodate Arnold integration. If your myopic view of the 3D world truly is only “Blender and programs that integrate seamlessly with it”, then good luck becoming anything other than a troll on a message board. There is a much bigger world of CGI out there than the one you’re choosing to see. If you’re assuming that just because a business isn’t running the way you want it to, and selling things or making them available at the price point you desire, that they will not be successful, then I can’t help you.
no use for it.
anyway, my jaw literally dropped when i read the title of the thread. and then i read the post, and now i’m sad again. haha
i thought maybe you were announcing they were going public with single licenses or something. there was a gentleman who was working on a Blender exporter a while back, but i haven’t followed that progress (obviously i don’t really have a reason to until Arnold’s actually available as a single license).
This is as close as you’ll probably get to a single license for a long time, and at $300 for their minimum enrollment cost for two classes, you get not only Arnold, but full basic training in it and enrollment in another class for excellent tutorial in an area of your choice. If I didn’t already have access to Arnold, I know what I’d be asking for for the holidays this year 