Autodesk has rolled out Arnold 7.4.3 and this time, the venerable renderer brings a new toy for the node-happy: the Inference imager. This feature lets users apply image-to-image machine learning models directly inside Arnold via ONNX, transforming frames with neural network-based stylization. If you want your render to look like a Picasso, at least for a single frame, you can now do it natively—though Autodesk admits this won’t guarantee temporal coherence or semantic stability when you try it on sequences. Translation: your animation could look like a different painting in every frame. Production artists, you have been warned.
Arnold GPU: Now With 3.3× More Hurry-Up
For anyone actually using Arnold’s GPU renderer in production, volume rendering on GPU is now up to 3.3× faster. This applies to both OpenVDB volumes and procedural volumes, so your clouds, smoke, and fog will eat fewer pizza breaks. Global Light Sampling is also up to 2.5× faster, and glossy materials on GPU behave a bit more like their slow CPU cousins. These are speed improvements, not new rendering techniques—so if your GPU is slow, it’s still slow, just less embarrassingly so.
Material World: OpenPBR, USD, and All the Acronyms
Arnold 7.4.3 improves OpenPBR-based subsurface scattering, especially for thin-walled materials, and brings the metal lobe in line with energy conservation principles. If you’re deep in the weeds of USD-based pipelines, there are more USD workflow tweaks and improved HTML render reporting for pipeline happiness (or at least, slightly fewer pipeline headaches).
Host App Plug-ins: Most Are Updated (Sorry, Houdini)
New plug-in versions for Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Katana are already available, so you can enjoy Arnold 7.4.3 in your DCC of choice—unless your choice is Houdini. At press time, Houdini users will need to wait for an updated plug-in. No magic workarounds provided.
20.07.2025: Update Houdini Plugin is available! Apparently we were too stupid to see it in the backend.
Platform Support and the CentOS 7 Eulogy
Arnold 7.4.3 runs on Windows 10+ and Linux with glibc 2.17+ and libstdc++ 4.8.5+ (basically, any current Linux workstation). MacOS 10.13 or later is also supported, but GPU rendering still needs an NVIDIA card—and thus remains Windows and Linux-only. This is also the final Arnold release to support CentOS 7, which officially reached end-of-life in 2024. If you’re still on CentOS 7, you’re officially out of excuses to delay that migration.
Pricing: Same Renderer, $15 More Per Year
Single-user subscriptions for Arnold are $55/month or $430/year. That’s a $15 annual price bump since 7.4.1. If you want to know what you’re paying for, that would be the Inference imager and (hopefully) a few more frames per second.
