Solid Angle releases Arnold for Katana
Solid Angle has officially taken over development of the Arnold for Katana plugin from The Foundry.
The plugin, which provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from inside The Foundry’s lighting and look dev tool, has been “revamped and rebranded to KtoA 1.0”.
KtoA is compatible with Katana 2 and is free to users of the core renderer.
Updates to the other plugins and core renderer
KtoA will be on show at Siggraph 2015, along with updates to the existing Houdini and Cinema 4D plugins, and the most recent 4.2.8 update to the core renderer.
According to Solid Angle: “The current 4.2.8 release is more than 10x faster at rendering OpenVDB volumes [than 4.2.0, released last year]. Hair/fur rendering is 2x faster and opacity-mapped foliage is 1000% faster.
Further speed boosts are promised in the upcoming 4.2.9, including “30% faster volumes, 2x faster hair, and 2x faster opacity-mapping. And stay tuned for OSL support.”
Pricing and availability
Arnold 4.2.8 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Since we last wrote about it, Solid Angle has cut the price of a node-locked licence to $790 and a floating licence to $1,220, including one year’s maintenance.