Arnold Renderer for C4D !???!

[Shawn Astrom]

So I played with Arnold yesterday for about 6 hours and I'm very confused...!

From what I can tell Arnold is slower compared to Corona and it was very tricky to get the Arnold standard material to do what I wanted... And no support for C4D shaders???

What do you all think of Arnold? Obviously it must be pretty good for big studios to be using it on major motion pictures but is it really any good for a freelancer?

Anyway, once Corona for C4D supports SSS and volumes... it seems that Corona will compliment Arnold.

I love Corona.

Thanks guys!

- Shawn

[karklinskarlis1993]

same here bro.
i tried arnold, as there were such a good words for it. i was so friggin disappointed as never. material building system is something new to me, hard to get in., easy to get confused and lost as its like nothing compaired to other 99% of renderers, so it will bend your mind and you will find tricky to move back with Physical render, vray etc, when it will be needed to. imho, its so slow, when it comes to final. interactive option is the only one which caught my eyes. Lightning was great, SSS quite good. maybe its me, or my display size, but i couldnt fit all the tabs needed for it, so it was hard to work with, for me. already uninstalled Arnold's trial, as i am not going to learn it further.

i am really looking forward to see any SSS support for Corona as well. i could blend few materials all together to fake SSS already, but its a bit complicated and hard to edit. otherwise - compairing to Arnold, Corona is the top way to go. much cleaner, much faster and much easier to get desired result. Arnold lightning system is more advanced, though with all those options. so, i hope to see much more advanced material system for Corona. otherwise - i love Corona and its top one behind C4D Physical Render, which is powerful as well.

All my love goes to developers of Corona. great work guys

[pBarrelas]

I also played with Arnold and Corona isn't more advanced than Arnold. Although Arnold doesn't support C4D shaders, it's fully production ready. It has a lot of shaders that compensate the lack of C4D shaders support.
As regarding speed, I also think that Corona is faster, at least about 50%, but in order to properly compare both, it would have to be on a lot of different type of scenes with different material setups, This way we could cover a lot different situations. I also think that a
fair comparison would have to be done in stage where Corona would be more mature.

Personally I think that once Corona is commercially ready, yes, it will be a faster renderer possibly in all situations and with a lot more fair pricing policy. By then I can't see why would anyone chose Arnold over Corona but only those studios that are already using Arnold with other packages. Corona will be a real winner.

I also don't like the elitist attitude Solid Angle adopted since the beginning, which is the absolute inverse of Render Legion, that has been listening to the community and not only big Hollywood studios.

[Ondra]

I also don't like the elitist attitude Solid Angle adopted since the beginning, which is the absolute inverse of Render Legion, that has been listening to the community and not only big Hollywood studios.

Sorry, but this is the most entitled and stupid thing I've read today. They are developing a renderer for movies/VFX. How dare they cater to VFX/movie industry?!

[pBarrelas]

Hey Ondra, before you take any conclusions about the above statement, and offend its author (me in this case), I advise you to ask the reasons that led me to state it instead of rushing with offensive declarations. I never thought of you being capable of making posts before thinking about it!

[Shawn Astrom]

I didn't really want to start any drama in this thread I just wanted a few other artists opinion on whether or not Arnold is a good option for a freelancer compared to Corona.

[Ludvik Koutny]

Hey Ondra, before you take any conclusions about the above statement, and offend its author (me in this case), I advise you to ask the reasons that led me to state it instead of rushing with offensive declarations. I never thought of you being capable of making posts before thinking about it!

I think what he meant to say is, that Solidangle listening to feedback from people like you to build renderer for high end Movie production would be as absurd as Ondra mainly focusing on feedback from big Hollywood studios when building archviz oriented renderer for general masses. They were building renderer for Hollywood studios to make movies in, so it's obvious they asked their target group for feedback. If you were making racing car tires, you would hardly ask medical doctors or chefs for their opinions on the matter.

And for astrofalcon: Yes, you basically answered yourself. If you do viz/design and you are freelancer, then Arnold is probably useless for your. But that doesn't mean it's bad renderer. Arnold is very capable and incomparably better than Corona in many points, especially considering they just released retail version of their C4D integration while Corona for C4D is just in second alpha. Both renderers have their strong point, but comparing them at this point and coming to such quick solutions is way off in this particular case :)

[Han]

Currently Arnold for C4D can also be considered alpha release.They sell the product unready.
Not to understand why people expect that Arnold will render faster.Arnold is very slow in the likeness of Maxwell Render - it requires a render farm.

[alekba]

Ehhhh. I really do not understand what Arnold seeks in Corona forum?
It seems to me that most do not know what writes. Arnold and Corona have different purposes. Also, an example which showed @Han is wrong and misleading....  Arnold dont work like that, he have a problem in areas with little light, like this interior. So, Arnold is not one button solution just like many people think.... Hollywood did not dismiss their  lighting ninjas. After all, about it a lot can be read on the Internet.
 I personally can  compare Corona renderer with Vray, Thea, AR, Modo, Octane and other who have similar purpose.  Corona has its own look and I like it.... unfortunately for now this quality is achieved in Max version. But that will change, I hope.

[Shawn Astrom]

The reason I started this thread was just simply to here from some other users of Corona. There is a tone of hype around Arnold and I just wanted to make sure I was not the only one that was not that impressed by it's initial release...

I have used Maxwell and Vray among a few others for years now and yes they all have there strong points but Corona is so impressive I have to wonder what sort of black magic is happening under the hood. I am by no means a coder and hardly understand complexity of programing a 3D render engine, all I know is that it seems that Corona is literally faster and better in quality than every render engine I have used thus far.

Anyway, I'd love to hear any more opinions about Arnold or any other render engine on here. Being a freelancer I hardly get to have conversations with other CGI nerds about render engines or any other 3D stuff for that matter, so anyway... Going to play with Corona for a bit now before I go do some yardwork... It's pretty nice here in Denver, CO.

Oh, and did I say that I can not wait for Corona's official C4D release...!

- Shawn

[RickToxik]

After a year working with Arnold (Maya) in a vfx studio, I can tell you that it really is a good render, surely one of the best that I've tried.  In fact I have tried a lot of renderers, most of them except RenderMan, Maxwell, and some others.  Arnold's strongest point, imho, is that it is a very robust renderer that will not fail you at render time.  It delivers the render you expect almost every time, no technical issue arise at the last minute like all other that I know.  So, pros and cons of Arnold that I can think of:

PROS:
- Targeted at rendering HUGE amounts of data (lights, polys, textures, etc) with minimal RAM usage.  Scenes like the spaceship of Elysium were rendered on macs with 16gb of RAM.  The more complex your scene gets, the more Arnold arises as the right renderer.

- Very intuitive and simple usage.  Artists coming from vray or mental ray get quickly familiar with Arnold, and the Ai Shader is very similar to vray Mtl (or corona's surface shader)

- Fast interactive rendering.  In maya, the IPR progressive render is pretty robust, you always have a render of your scene going on while you move, edit and transform your scene.

- It's also easy to integrate in custom scripts and support most of maya's native features.

- Does everything you need for vfx and integration with footage.  Intergates so well with MARI!

CONS:
- NOT targeted at Archviz.  For a reason that mystifies me, Arnold can get very noisy (like the comparison above) in interior lighting scenarios.  Solid Angle has a complete "workarounds" section in its docs for lighting a simple interior...  This is the most problematic feature to me of Arnold, that can discourage you to use it as a multi-purpose renderer.

- Can produce fireflies / hotspots.  Some rays in Arnold can get very hot - especially with IES - and therefore produce fireflies.  Arnold has a clamp in its render settings, but it can become very hard sometimes to track down which light / material produces fireflies and you may need to use non-physical workarounds to overcome this issue.

- No distributed rendering yet, I love when a renderer has this feature!

[Shawn Astrom]

I just wanted to update my comments about Arnold.

I have been using it for motion graphics and other work than Arch Viz and it is really fantastic. The newest plugin works great on C4D. After doing more testing and learning how Arnold works it is truly a great render engine!

Still can't wait to buy Corona for C4D when it is finished :)

- Shawn

[Rhodesy]

Interesting. Last time I looked the pricing was pretty steep if you needed a few nodes - is this still the case? Im going to be corona all the way as I just do arch viz but I'm always interested in render engine tech - or anything 3D!

[FrostKiwi]

Arnold was closed of in its younger days.
No demo - no nothing. Just screenshots and the option for you to pay and they will send you the renderer.

It believe it was a mix of fear of critisim by ppl who didn't understand what it was for and what was stated by many arnold early adopters - piracy prevention.

Arnold works on exact opposite guide lines of Corona, which is why opinions collide.

Arnold is made, as stated many times, for VFX purposes. It throws physical correctness out of the window in favor of artist's control. No ray switching needed. AO is constantly needed to add depth on selected targets and see here - implemented right into arnold.
It has no novel smart way of rendering stuff. It is ment to be used with a render farm and it shows. It's like VRAY with only bruteforce GI.this is why interior scenes suffer the most. You just need interpolation on walls or you just keep sampling a mostly simple plane with gezillions of rays. But this is what vfx artists need. Characters, Organic monsters, mega amounts of grass and foilige that doesn't flicker no matter how far you push it.

What archviz needs is the exact opposite. This is what makes people angry at times, that they look at arnold and say "ohh this is slow, too bad" whilst not seeing that it was meant to be robust and specificly with a render farm in mind.