Arnold render settings

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With our scene laid out. Now it's time to take a look at the Arnold render settings.

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We'll be using the Arnold render view window

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which is an advanced virtual frame buffer with many awesome features.

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It can be found in the Arnold menu,

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Arnold render view.

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And if we give focus to the physical camera viewport

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and start the interactive production rendering by clicking on the red triangle,

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then we will see an interactive production rendering

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with default materials and lighting.

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The Arnold render view or A RV

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is great for everything

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material look development,

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lighting previews

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and even final production rendering.

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Since the A RV uses the production rendering settings,

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we'll want to check in on those settings

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before we begin working on materials and lighting.

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So I'll close the Arnold render view,

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open up the render setup dialogue

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and at the top, we see target

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render set up has multiple target modes.

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Most importantly, production rendering mode

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and active shade mode.

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Each mode can be configured independently

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and the settings for each will be remembered

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as long as we don't change the active renderer for that mode.

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If we wanted to render using Arnold in the viewport directly

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or in the active shade window,

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then we would choose active shade as our target mode

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and then we would configure the render settings for quick previews.

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But since the Arnold render view has many advantages over active shade,

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we will be using the A RV.

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In that case, we'll need to configure the settings for production rendering mode,

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not active shade.

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So I'll switch this back over to production rendering mode

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and will create two presets.

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One for interactive draft quality rendering

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and another preset for final production.

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Let's start with the draft rendering.

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We've already set up our width and height

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in the common tab.

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We set the output size to width and height of 540 pixels.

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Now let's go over to the system tab.

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We will be using some legacy three Ds max maps.

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So we want to enable legacy three DS max map support

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down here. We see threads

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and it's defaulted to auto detect threads.

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That means it's going to use all of the computer's CPU power.

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We can restrict that in the Arnold render view

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itself so we can throttle the processor usage there.

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I recommend if you're using the Arnold render view

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to just leave the auto detect threads switch enabled here.

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Then over in the Arnold renderer tab,

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we have controls for the number of samples

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and the ray depth.

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The default values for samples are two for diffuse and specular components

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and that's fine for a draft quality rendering.

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I do want to increase the number of rays or bounces

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just a little bit.

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So we'll have a bit more realistic material previews.

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I'll bring the diffuse ray depth up to two

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and the specular ray depth also up to two

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been down here in adaptive and progressive.

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There is a switch for progressive render.

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Let's enable that.

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That'll give us a little bit faster

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previews when we're developing materials and lighting

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because we won't have to wait for buckets or little squares of rendering to appear

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in the Arnold render view

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with progressive render.

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The final render pass is going to be

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drawn by updating pixels randomly across the frame.

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So that's great for interactive production rendering.

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So those are the settings that we want for our draft quality.

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Let's go

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up here under preset.

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We can choose save, preset,

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it's going to save inside the current project's render presets folder.

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We'll call it Arnold

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underscore draft

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and click save.

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Then we get a dialogue in which we can choose which

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we want to store in this preset.

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We do want to store the common tab.

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We do want to store the environment

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and Arnold,

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but we don't particularly care about the effects or

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render elements because those are actually legacy aspects.

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So if we want, we can turn those off,

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but we do want to make sure that we government

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and Arnold selected.

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So click save

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and that preset is stored and it's now currently active.

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Now we want to establish our settings for the production quality preset.

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So back in the common tab,

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let's increase the render size,

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we can turn the image aspect lock padlock on.

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So it's going to stay a square aspect ratio.

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Let's set the width to 1080 pixels

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press enter

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and that also sets the height to 1080.

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Now we want to go back to the Arnold renderer tab

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and change up the samples in ray depth for final production rendering.

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We do want to have a little bit deeper ray tracing,

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we want more bounces. So we'll set the number of diffuse rays to four,

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the number of specular rays also to four.

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And we're going to have a highly reflective floor or ground plane.

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And for that, we want a bit better quality in the specular component,

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bring the specular samples up to four as well.

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We don't want to use progressive rendering for a final production render

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that's just going to slow down the process.

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So instead of progressive render,

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we want to just draw with the normal buckets or squares.

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So turn the progressive render off for production rendering

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just to make sure that we don't have any issues,

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we can increase the number of total rays

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that's done in the depth limits,

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bring the ray limit total up to a value of 20

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just to make sure that we don't have any problems

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in which rays are able to penetrate into transparent surfaces and so on.

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OK.

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Those are our production settings so we can go

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ahead and store that as a preset as well.

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Go up to preset and from the pull down list, choose save, preset

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and we call this one

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Arnold production,

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click save.

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And once again, we don't need the effects and render elements so we can turn those off

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and click save.

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And now to switch back and forth between production and draft quality,

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all we need to do is choose the appropriate preset.

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So I'll switch back to Arnold Draft

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and then load all those categories.

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Now we're back to ra depth of two and two

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and a resolution of 540 by 540.

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OK. With our Arnold render settings established,

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we're now ready to create a simple

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HDR lighting setup for material look development.