An extensive array of built-in Arnold professional shaders and materials.Procedural (proxy) objects allow scene interchange with other Arnold plugins.Volumetric effects with OpenVDB support.Visit the Downloads page or click this link.
It is recommended to update the plugin that ships with 3ds Max before editing scenes and to always use the latest plugin available to ensure feature support.
Since this plugin is under continuous development and available separately from 3ds Max, you can now download directly from the Solid Angle website the newest version of MAXtoA with the very latest version of Arnold. An Update is Available for MAXtoA for 3ds Max 2018 This document refers to the newest MAXtoA build 812 available on the Solid Angle.
After four beta releases to the Solid Angle website, we are now including MAXtoA with the install of 3ds Max 2018. MAXtoA is the Arnold renderer plugin for 3ds Max. We'll look at these elements in-depth, starting with asset preparation, importing, and using CAD data, which is up next.Model courtesy of Evermotion, and rendered in MAXtoA 1.0. You'll find it easier to build on what you know and leverage the material, lighting, and rendering processes you're already familiar with. Download the Mental Ray and that will give you iRay, as well, and take some time to move into using Arnold. And you can kind of ease into switching over to Arnold that way. What that means is, if you don't want to automatically convert over to use Arnold, you can select Mental Ray as your renderer. And once you've done that, under Render Setup, you're going to have Mental Ray in there. Just fill it out with your email address and then select the version that you need for, in our case, Max for Windows. The other thing that I would suggest doing is, especially if you're converting from a Mental Ray to using Arnold and, especially, if you've built up a lot of material libraries in 3ds Max, previous version of Max and using Mental Ray, what you're going to do is download Mental Ray for Max 2018. And so, go ahead and select set, acknowledge that message and then restart Max and come back in. You're going to get a message that this will show up when you restart Max. So, make sure that Max.ART is selected and then click Set. And so, when you do a scene conversion or you do some import from a previous version, you won't have any conflicts or any problems converting your materials over. With Max.ART, what it does is it changes all your materials slots to physical materials. Click on Max.ART and then take some time to read, you know, what are all the changes. When you open up, you're probably going to be set to Max. Then, we're going to go to Customize, and we're going to go to "Custom UI and Defaults Switcher". That's about all you need to do right here other than make sure that Arnold is set as your renderer and click X to get out of that. This allows you to use all the great material maps that Max has been using for years and we'll use some of those, as well, in our project here. Under System, make sure that "Legacy 3ds Max support" is checked on. Alright, the next thing that we need to do is that, while we're in the Render Settings, let's take a look at a couple of things. And then, when you open up your Render Settings, what will happen is that Arnold will appear in the list here once you've restarted. You'll probably have to close Max in order to get it to install. It has an installer and you will install that into Max. But if you have an earlier version, then click on 3ds Max 2018. Basically, you want to check out the right number and that's the number I have so I don't need to download it. And you're going to go to the Downloads page. Then, you're going to scroll down and click on Arnold for 3ds Max. And that will bring up this website, the Solid Angle website. Let's go to Content - Help, click on Solid Angle. So, it's important that you always look for the updates. I have the latest version but I may not in a week or so. And this will show you the product version that you have. Click on that, go to Arnold, Help, and click on About MaxtoA right here. Up here next to Content, there's a little arrow. They're developing new features all the time, and they release new versions quite often. The first thing you want to do is you want to make sure you have the latest version of Arnold. Let's make those changes and look at the scene files we'll be working with now. Using Arnold requires some adjustments to your 3ds Max settings.