research-article

Arnold: A Brute-Force Production Path Tracer

Authors:

Iliyan Georgiev,

Mike Farnsworth,

Ramón Montoya-Vozmediano,

Brecht Van Lommel,

Adrien Herubel,

Declan Russell,

Frédéric Servant,

Marcos FajardoAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 37, Issue 3

Article No.: 32, Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/3182160

Published: 01 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Arnold is a physically based renderer for feature-length animation and visual effects. Conceived in an era of complex multi-pass rasterization-based workflows struggling to keep up with growing demands for complexity and realism, Arnold was created to take on the challenge of making the simple and elegant approach of brute-force Monte Carlo path tracing practical for production rendering. Achieving this required building a robust piece of ray-tracing software that can ingest large amounts of geometry with detailed shading and lighting and produce images with high fidelity, while scaling well with the available memory and processing power.

Arnold’s guiding principles are to expose as few controls as possible, provide rapid feedback to artists, and adapt to various production workflows. In this article, we describe its architecture with a focus on the design and implementation choices made during its evolutionary development to meet the aforementioned requirements and goals. Arnold’s workhorse is a unidirectional path tracer that avoids the use of hard-to-manage and artifact-prone caching and sits on top of a ray-tracing engine optimized to shoot and shade billions of spatially incoherent rays throughout a scene. A comprehensive API provides the means to configure and extend the system’s functionality, to describe a scene, render it, and save the results.

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Cited By

Li YZhu CNichols GKutz PHuang WAdler DBurley BTeece D(2024)Cache Points for Production-Scale Occlusion-Aware Many-Lights Sampling and Volumetric ScatteringProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670993(1-19)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670993
Stein CHellmuth CConty Estevez ALecocq PGritz L(2024)Spear: Across the Streaming Multiprocessors: Porting a Production Renderer to the GPUProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670988(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670988
Leria EMäkitalo MJääskeläinen PSjöström MZhang T(2024)Interactive Multi-GPU Light Field Path Tracing Using Multi-Source Spatial ReprojectionProceedings of the 30th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology10.1145/3641825.3687710(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2024
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Index Terms

Arnold: A Brute-Force Production Path Tracer
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Rendering
      1. Ray tracing

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 37, Issue 3

Special Issue On Production Rendering and Regular Papers

June 2018

198 pages

ISSN:0730-0301

EISSN:1557-7368

DOI:10.1145/3243123

Editor:
Kavita Bala
Cornell University

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Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 01 August 2018

Accepted: 01 January 2018

Revised: 01 January 2018

Received: 01 December 2017

Published in TOG Volume 37, Issue 3

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Li YZhu CNichols GKutz PHuang WAdler DBurley BTeece D(2024)Cache Points for Production-Scale Occlusion-Aware Many-Lights Sampling and Volumetric ScatteringProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670993(1-19)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670993
Stein CHellmuth CConty Estevez ALecocq PGritz L(2024)Spear: Across the Streaming Multiprocessors: Porting a Production Renderer to the GPUProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670988(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670988
Leria EMäkitalo MJääskeläinen PSjöström MZhang T(2024)Interactive Multi-GPU Light Field Path Tracing Using Multi-Source Spatial ReprojectionProceedings of the 30th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology10.1145/3641825.3687710(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641825.3687710
Foin GBrunel LCornet JDauchet JGros FVourc’h T(2024) Extending the use of normal hemispherical transmittance ( ) measurements by modeling 3D multiple scattering radiative transfer Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer10.1016/j.jqsrt.2024.109124327(109124)Online publication date: Nov-2024
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