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[Arnold] Tips for reducing noise when rendering interior scenes with indirect...
Indirect lighting of interior scenes can be a challenge, but there are some things you can do. In this post, we’ll give you some quick tips, but you can find more detailed information on...
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[Arnold] Rolling shutter in a nutshell
What’s rolling shutter? It’s an effect, or artifact, that looks like like this: Rolling shutter means that the image isn’t captured all at once, but one scanline at a time: Lee posted a video walk...
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[MtoA] MayaFile node uses a default color for missing textures
Here’s something important to remember when you’re debugging a scene… By default, the MayaFile node uses a default color if a texture is missing. This means the render won’t abort because of missing...
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Cinema 4D R17 crashes at startup when C4DtoA is installed
C4DtoA requires R17.032 I’ve had a number of cases where people had earlier versions of C4D R17 and couldn’t use C4DtoA. That’s because C4DtoA was built against the C4D R17.032 SDK.
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[MtoA] Creating the defaultArnold nodes in scripting
Loading MtoA isn’t enough to create the defaultArnoldRenderOptions node. The defaultArnoldRenderOptions node isn’t created until a user opens the Arnold Render Settings for the first time. In code, you...
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[MtoA] Per-light AOVs for volumes
Arnold 4.2.12.2 added support for per-light AOVs for volumetrics. Here’s how to set up per-light AOVs in MtoA 1.2.6.0: In the light Attribute Editor, enter a name for the light group. Create a custom...
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WARNING mtoa_shading_groups: unresolved reference
Any time you see “node … is not installed” and “unresolved reference” warnings when you try to kick an ASS file exported from Maya, the problem is missing MtoA shaders. 00:00:00 18MB WARNING | [ass]...
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Why can’t I use kick -set options.shader_searchpath ?
You may wonder: why can’t I use kick -set options.shader_searchpath to tell Arnold where to find shaders? Well, it’s because kick loads the ASS file first, then applies the kick -set parameter...
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Portable ASS files with relative paths and the Texture Search Path
You can make your ASS files portable across different platforms by using relative paths and the texture search path. For example, if all textures are specified by relative paths like...
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[C4DtoA] Installing C4DtoA in a custom location
The C4DtoA installer puts the C4DtoA plugin in the default location: the plugins folder of the Cinema 4D install. If you want to put C4DtoA somewhere else, like a shared network location, you can use...
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WARNING : [ass] node name already in use
Shader nodes must have unique names. So if you’re using standins, each standin ASS file has to have unique shader node names. Otherwise you’ll get unexpected results when you render, like all standins...
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[HtoA] [Tip] Speeding up motion blur on VDB volumes
Merging your velocity vel.x, vel.y, and vel.z grids into a single vector grid using a Vdb Vector Merge node can speed up your renders. You can safely ignore the “component grids have different...
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The case of the blue render view
Reason #35 why you should check the Arnold log In this case, a scene that used to render yesterday, now just resulted in a blue render view, like this: Anytime the render view doesn’t update when your...
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[Tip] Save a few threads for yourself
As of Arnold 4.2.12.0, you can specify a negative number of threads, and Arnold will leave that many threads free. So, for example, if you want to leave two threads free for Maya while the IPR view is...
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[Arnold] Loading obj files with the procedural node
An Arnold procedural node (aka a standin) can load OBJ files.
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[MtoA] Adding per-face and per-vertex user data
With Maya and MtoA, there’s no easy way to add per-face and per-vertex user data attributes to objects. You’ve got to do it with scripting: add an array attribute with addAttr and then provide the...
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[Arnold] ndoteye shade mode
The Utility shader has a super-fast ndoteye shading mode. This shading mode doesn’t trace any rays: it simply shades based on the angle between camera (eye vector) and the surface normal (ndoteye =...
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[MtoA] mtoa missing from Plug-in Manager
If mtoa.mll is not listed in the Plug-in Manager, that means that Maya did not find the MtoA module file (mtoa.mod). And if you try to manually load mtoa.mll, you’ll get errors like this: // Error:...
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[Arnold] [kick] Enabling tiled EXRs
Suppose you have a load of ASS files that were exported with the Tiled option disabled. How could you re-enable the Tiled option without re-exporting the ASS files? With the kick -set flag, that’s how:...
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[MtoA] [Arnold] The case of the mesh light and the facing-ratio material
In this case, we have a torus as a mesh light. The mesh light color is facing-ratio ramp, so that in the Beauty AOV, the polygons facing the incoming camera ray are red, and polygons facing away are...
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