Arion 1.5.1 comes with many improvements. Among them is probably the most discreet yet the most visible one: noise convergence.

We have improved the noise convergence again. The grain is finer and denser, the sampling more uniform. Arion now renders cleaner in less time, and that benefits your work.

We have also improved dramatically the noise during the real-time navigation for an even better and smoother user experience.

One of the most awaited features for a GPU renderer is now available with Arion 1.5.1.

Our Sub-Surface Scattering is entirely physically-based, capable of the most complex light scattering beneath the object's surface to mimic virtually any material in the world.

Arion's Sub-Surface Scattering is fully integrated into our brand new BRDF model. It can do forward and backward scattering (or both at once), has control over the density of the matter in a physical way and is not limited in any way.

Single-Sheet Sub-Surface Scattering was a RandomControl exclusive feature when it was originally released in fryrender.

We're bringing this awesome feature to Arion now, enabling you to render beautiful and really efficient lamp shades, leaves and vegetation in general, occlusion screens... And much more.

Thanks to the new BRDF, S5 is now fully compatible with roughness and dielectric transmission as well, and that is yet another exclusive feature of our technology.

Participating media is one of those features that you were not particularly missing before, but once you have it, you can't go back!

Fog can be used in many situations to improve the realism of your scene by adding dust in the air.

Our participating media system is very powerful and flexible as it is based on our standard SSS material. You create a material, you point Participating media to it by typing its name, you enable Participating Media and that's it. You can then freely tweak your material to change the way the fog reacts to light.

For example a high asymmetry will give you very 'focused' fog that will look like glowing almost (like the red lights bike render), while a negative asymmetry will randomize the light scattering and make your scene look backlit by the fog. It's all a lot of fun!

Emitters can now be color and opacity mapped, and thanks to good programing and the new CUDA4, it's not any slower than plain color emitters.

Fireplaces, TV-set screens, mapped candle flames etc. are no longer a problem for Arion!

All this is of course editable interractively within Arion.

Arion 1.5.1 now supports real world, calibrated emitter units.

Watts, Lumens, Candela, lux and luminance are supported, as well as efficacy when applicable.

A great effort has also been made to make the emitters importance sampling as efficient as possible, for even cleaner renders.

You can also bend that importance sampling by attributing an importance factor to an emitter in the object properties panel.

Arion 1.5.1 improved BRDF model comes with a significant improvement in realism and workflow: The plastic coatings.

In a traditional material to add a reflection, you would have added a second layer and played with the weight of layer 1 and 2 to get it right. Thanks to the coatings, you can now do that withing a single layer!

Plastic coatings allow for a material to look 100% reflective at grazing angles, according to the fresnel function indice (nd), while a material with 2 layers would reflect only as much as the weight value is.

Plastic coatings can be color and roughness mapped. We highly recommend that you use them, as they're fully physically-correct and greatly increase the realism of your render.

Yes you've read it right. Arion 1.5.1 integrates rough dielectrids! What does this means in practice?

It means that your rough dielectrics (like frosted glass) objects will render really fast with any emitter size, with full total internal reflections and caustics, not less!

This feature is unique in the world of rendering and is a very nice mathematical achievement.

The picture on the right has been rendered in just 5 minutes with 2 GPU using a physically modeled spotlight with a very small emitter.

We have improved the physical sky color fidelity in this version.

The difference between a render that looks natural and one the looks CG sometimes is just about getting the colors right.

Spectrums conversion had never been so right before in Arion, we can now render deep blue sky that looks just like the one through your window.

With the New GPS positioning tool, it's so easy to render true-to-life images of any place around the world.

Do you like the quality of the render above?

We're glad because it was rendered in an unbiased 'draft' mode using Arion 1.5.1 in a bit over... 2 minutes. You can take a look at a comparison between the regular unbiased kernel and the draft one by clicking here.

This kernel is really useful to setup a scene and navigate really fast, which is why it was originally made. But we found out that it was capabe of delivering final production quality in many cases as well!

The draft mode also comes in particularly handy to render animations, be it previews or final quality.

Welcome to a new era of computer rendered graphics.

The new RandomControl BRDF version 2.0 is a major achievement for us. It's mathematically pure and perfect, anihilating energy loss without any compensation or patching. It is just doing it RIGHT.

This is a feature that you will see nowhere else, because nobody has addressed that problem fully so far. All the known models have some degree of energy loss, half-working compensation or are not compatible with some features like anisotropy.

Our model provides a final answer to that issue and ensures that your renders always look like they should, providing vivid, true-to-life light simulation.

The image on the right *demonstrates* how seamlessly our model goes from roughness 99 to 100, without any jump and with really perfect and pure whites, without a dark border at grazing angles.

The second thumbnail is showing a set of balls ranging from roughness 0 to 100, enclosed in an emitting grid shelf. The left image is Ambient occlusion, the right one is the full render.

Appreciate that it looks like a plain color, just like it should. Purity of carefully crafted mathematics at work!

New compositing channels were included in Arion 1.5.1, giving you even more control on your final render.

We have added the Roughness and Fresnel channels that allow you to tweak your reflections in post-production.

But that's not all! Now you can also define 'shadows catchers' objects per material to render matte-shadows channels. All these improvements are included in Arion 1.5.1.

• Exclude from camera (hide)


• Decal mode shows emitters by color instead of power


• Dispersion ON/OFF switch


• Emitters and 'others' (like physical sky) ON/OFF switch


• Color maps ON/OFF switch


• Bump maps ON/OFF switch


• Explicit material ID: Make your custom MatID channel


• Explicit object ID: Make your custom ObjID channel

• Better fresnel


• LUA scripting


• Emitters and Sun are now working together


• Caustics ON/OFF flag


• Ability to rename objects, camera, materials


• Aspect ratio is saved in the file


• FOV is now horizontally docked


• Smoother navigation noise (antialiased)


• Editable emitters in realtime...

Special thanks

We would like to thank all our customers for their amazing works using Arion.

We are also specially grateful to the people who have helped us during the testing and the production of this fine release of Arion:

Fran Davey, John Strieder, Johnny Butcher, Pawel Filip, Marco Podrini, Raphaël Aguirre, Roman Vrbovsky, Shaun Keenan, Stéphane Moya, Luis Morillo and Héctor Pérez.