14 August 2017

With the recent addition of the Autodesk Licensing Framework, we are able to offer some excellent new ways to use Arnold. At SIGGRAPH2017 we announced two new initiatives, opening up Arnold to more users and adding tremendous value to those who use Arnold in production every day:

Arnold Packs

We are very excited to announce a new offering - Arnold Packs. These are bundles of Arnold (annual) subscription licenses, which customers can use locally or on the cloud. We are currently offering the Arnold 5-Pack promo: 5 Arnold licenses for USD $1500/year*. By comparison, the price of 5 individual Arnold subscription licenses is currently USD $3000/year, so purchasing Arnold Packs means substantial savings. We hope that Arnold Packs will both bring Arnold to more users, and let existing users scale up their rendering capacity more easily. To take advantage of the Arnold 5-Pack promo please contact your local Autodesk Reseller. There are no limits to the number of Arnold 5-Packs that can be purchased.

Arnold now FREE for Educational Institutions

We are also pleased to announce that Arnold is now free for educational institutions. Arnold has a long history in rendering research and academia, and we are happy to be able to support and encourage computer graphics education around the world. Faculty, instructors and Program Directors interested in running Arnold at their school can visit the Autodesk Education Portal to request Arnold Educational Licenses. Individual student users of Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max can download the latest versions that come bundled with Arnold for interactive rendering. Student users of any of our other supported 3D DCC tools (Cinema4D, Houdini and Katana) should request additional Arnold educational licenses through their academic institution.

“Arnold has boosted the creative and technical curiosity of my students. Short film projects now focus on lighting as creative design, rather than a rendering burden. Technical students are deeply interested in understanding and coding the guts of path tracing after seeing the beautiful results produced by Arnold.”

- Jerry Tessendorf, Clemson University

Arnold Answers

In other exciting news, we are pleased to share Arnold Answers, a new reputation-based technical Q&A forum for all Arnold users. The goal of the Arnold Answers forum was for Arnold users everywhere to be able to share and gain knowledge about rendering with Arnold across all of our popular 3D plugins. You will find spaces for HtoA, MtoA, C4DtoA, KtoA, MAXtoA and SItoA, along with the Arnold core renderer, Development and Shader Hacking. We look forward to building a supportive community on Arnold Answers.

*Pricing at time of publication. As of April 30, 2018 this 5-Pack promo has ended.