Anisotropy controls forcoat in standard_surface. Improved random-walk SSS: a new randomwalk_v2 SSS mode has been added that scatters more accurately and deeply through highly-transparent/optically-thin objects, which produces SSS with more saturated colors around fine surface detail and heavily backlit regions of an object. Microfacet multiple scattering: the GGX microfacet BSDF used in the standard_surface shader has been improved to account for multiple scattering between the microfacets, which is more physically correct and reduces energy loss on reflection, especially at higher roughness settings. Visible lights: the quad, disk, cylinder and point lights now have a camera and a transmission attribute, allowing these lights to become visible inrender. Even for more uniformly colored skydomes, the improved sampler will waste fewer samples in directions that are below the hemisphere, allowing for lower skydome light sample rates to be used which should give a noticeable speedup. Therefore bright areas in theskydome are less likely to 'steal' samples when they are below the normal.

Improved skydome sampling: Arnold now takes into account the normal of the shading point whenimportance sampling the skydome. With the new metric, pixels are being dropped gradually in a smoother and much more predictable manner,resulting much lower render times for identical noise levels. Improved adaptive sampling: adaptive sampling now uses a more effective criterion. For a complete description of requirements, features and caveats, see Getting Started With Arnold GPU. We plan to gradually improve this in subsequent releases and would appreciate your feedback. Note that due to beta status of GPU rendering, a number of features are missing, performance is not final, and use in production is not advised. NVIDIA GPUs from Turing to Maxwell architectures are supported, and Arnold will take advantage of multiple GPUs, NVLink and NVIDIA® RTX hardware accelerated raytracing if available. GPU rendering (BETA): you can now switch between CPU and GPU render devices interactively and expect visually similar results.

Maya 2018 student version arnold plugin