Autodesk Acquires Solid Angle

Autodesk has announced the acquisition of Solid Angle, developer of Arnold, an advanced, ray-tracing image renderer for high-quality 3D animation and visual effects creation used in film, television and advertising worldwide.

An efficient global illumination renderer used by more than 500 studios and thousands of independent artists, Arnold has become the preferred tool among creative professionals for high-quality rendering. Arnold has been used on Academy Award-winning films such as Ex Machina and The Martian as well as Emmy Award-winning series Game of Thrones, among other popular features, TV shows and commercials.

"We're constantly looking out for promising technologies that help artists boost creativity and productivity," Chris Bradshaw, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment, said.
"Efficient rendering is increasingly critical for 3D content creation and acquiring Solid Angle will allow us to help customers better tackle this computationally intensive part of the creative process. Together, we can improve rendering workflows within our products as well as accelerate the development of new rendering solutions that tap into the full potential of the cloud, helping all studios scale production."

"Autodesk shares our passion for numerical methods and computational performance and our desire to simplify the rendering pipeline, so artists can create top quality visuals more easily," Solid Angle Founder Marcos Fajardo, also said.
"With Autodesk, we'll be able to accelerate development as well as scale our marketing, sales and support operations for Arnold to better meet the needs of our growing user base. Working side-by-side, we can solve production challenges in rendering and beyond."

As part of Autodesk, Solid Angle's development team will continue to drive the evolution of Arnold, working in close collaboration with its user community. Arnold will remain available as a standalone renderer for both Autodesk products and third-party applications including Houdini, Katana, and Cinema 4D on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Both Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya will also continue to support other third-party renderers.

"As with other acquisitions, we are committed to supporting third-party applications with Arnold," explains Bradshaw. "Our goal is to improve customers' collaboration, creativity, productivity and efficiency across their entire pipeline, regardless of the tools they use."

autodesk.com