Monthly Archives:
April 2016

Arnold is one of the leading render plugins in the world of 3D graphics. It is a fast and efficient Monte Carlo raytracer. The realism that it delivers, added to the simplicity of its interface, is what made Solid Angle’s masterpiece so popular.

In the press release on April the 18^tth 2016 at 8:00 am EDT, Autodesk announces the acquisition of Solid Angle, the company behind Arnold*.

“Arnold started as an experiment at Cinesite a little while ago but has quickly become our primary renderer. What impressed us most apart from the blazing raytrace speed, low memory consumption and stability with everything & anything you throw at it, is the elegant ease of use, allowing artists to focus on their art rather than technicalities.”

Chris Nickel, CG Supervisor, Cinesite

Arnold has taken the VFX industry by storm, making a name of itself and getting integrated in the pipeline of over 500 studios worldwide, on projects like Oscar winning. Ex Machina to TV series like HBO’s Game of Thrones.

EX-MACHINA

GAME OF THRONES

SolidAngle started selling Arnold on their website since 2014, making it accessible to the public. The main concerns come mainly from non-Autodesk users that have been rendering via Arnold since its release on other 3D software like Houdini and Cinema 4D. Their concern is that they would stop developing the software any further, as it happened to other Autodesk purchases, or that they will focus mainly on the development of this plugin on the Autodesk main software, Maya.

We all hope for the best for this new acquirement by Autodesk and, with the industry moving forward, we have to keep ourselves  up to date on the technological advances of the 3D world.

*Press Release: http://news.autodesk.com/press-release/autodesk-boosts-advanced-rendering-capabilities-through-acquisition-solid-angle

Wondering how to choose your 3D Application

Giuseppe Boschiero
Technical Director & 3D Generalist

Track mattes define the layer’s visibility according to the previous layer/the layer on top.
To find them you need to click on Toggle Switches for 4 columns to appear:

Mode | T | Track Matte | Parent

There are two kinds of track mattes:
Luma and Alpha

• The Alpha matte, as the name gives away, uses the layer’s alpha channels to pick what can or can’t be visible.

So let’s say we want bananas to be coming out of the gramophone’s horn.

You create a shape layer of the place that you want to contain the bananas

Put the layer over the bananas layer then select alpha matte from the track matte list.

It pretty much works the same way a clipping mask would work in software like Photoshop or illustrator.

If you select Alpha inverted matte, the shape layer works the opposite way: everything but that shape can contain the bananas layer.

• The Luma matte uses black and white:
  Everything white is visible, everything black is invisible, and all the 50 or more shades of grey differ in-between both visibilities.

Duplicate the gramophone’s layer; go to effects – Black & White from the effects and presets panel. Here, the changes depend on the colors present in your footage, picture. My goal is to write “Luma” behind the pink horn, so I’ll need to isolate the background from it.

By adding a maximum of red, the red colors become white while reducing the blues and cyans (other major colors in the picture) you create a more pronounced contrast of black and white.

Write “Luma” in a text layer, and place the black and white layer on top of it.

Your layers should be in this order:
-B&W gramophone
-Luma Text
-Initial gramophone

Select “Luma inverted layer” and then let the track matte do its thing.

Vickie Boschiero
Junior Animation Art Director