Solid Angle has joined Autodesk

Big news today! We are proud and excited to let you know that our team at Solid Angle has made a move that expands in a big way our capacity to keep pushing rendering forward. We’ve joined Autodesk! We are now part of the passionate Media & Entertainment team that includes Maya, Shotgun and RV, working to help artists create beautiful animation and VFX faster and easier across platforms and pipelines.

The full story is here but we want to call out the most important things directly.

First, what you love about Arnold isn’t going to change. The Solid Angle team is still leading and driving Arnold’s technology direction, development and support. We have not handed Arnold over – we have joined Autodesk to keep moving it forward at the speed you know and expect, working closely with you as always. We are still here to help you with licensing, sales and support.

Second, development of Arnold plug-ins for Katana, Cinema4D, Houdini and Softimage – and other software will absolutely continue. Openness is everyone’s goal.

Please see the FAQ for more information.

In addition, fxguide interviewed Marcos and the Autodesk team, you can read the full article here.

Why are we doing this? To scale.

When we started Solid Angle we always envisioned that Arnold adoption would someday grow to where it was used on the world's top productions, but we didn't anticipate the impact that massive worldwide growth would have on our business. It's thrilling to see how far Arnold now reaches. But with 500 studios and thousands of artists now using Arnold and more joining the Arnold family every day, it is becoming more complex to meet the needs of a user community growing that fast and what has become a multi-national business.

Joining Autodesk allows us to focus more on developing elegant numerical methods and algorithms to improve rendering performance and quality, while giving us access to the resources and expertise we need to grow our business and make our technology accessible to more users around the world.

Autodesk understands how critical rendering is to the production workflow, and is committed to supporting us in our mission. They share our passion for solving tough problems through technology. We have never been more dedicated to bringing artists the best rendering tools than we are today, and we believe that joining Autodesk is the best way to do that. Thank you for using Arnold and helping us push rendering forward. We’re excited for what’s ahead.

Please call or email any of us if you have questions about what this all means for you or Arnold.

– Marcos and the Arnold team