Updating the Arnold plugin

- [Instructor] Arnold was created and is developed by a company called Solid Angle which is a subsidiary of Autodesk, but Solid Angle kind of marches to the beat of a different drummer. Because Arnold is a plugin renderer, its development schedule is completely different to that of the host applications such as Maya, 3DS Max or Cinema 4D. Arnold is updated much more frequently than the host applications are, and so you need to check in quite frequently to see that you have the most recent version of Arnold.

There's currently no auto update or push notifications to let you know when there's a new version of Arnold. So first you want to know what version of Arnold you're running. And in Maya in the Arnold menu, go to about. In the about dialog, we see M2A, and that's the plugin name, and we're currently on M2A version 2.0.1, and below that is the Arnold core which is the code that's common to all of the Arnold plugins for the various 3D applications.

And the Arnold core is currently at 5.0.1. Okay, so we just need to know that we have M2A version 2.0.1 and we can close the about dialog. And we can check for the most recent version on the Solid Angle website. Once again, we can go into the Arnold menus and choose help, and go directly to the Solid Angle website from here. I've already got it open in another window.

So here's the home page for Solid Angle. To check on version updates, go to the Arnold section, and then in the sub-menu, choose downloads. And here you will see the current version for your application. And it says the current version of Arnold for Maya is 2.0.1, so my system is up to date. If I need to update, I can follow these links to find the plugins for the various versions of Maya.

But I'm up to date so I don't need to bother doing that now. Be aware that you first need to register with the Solid Angle website in order to have permissions to download files. And that's how to check the version of Arnold in Maya and where to find the updates on the Solid Angle website. And now we're ready to begin learning concepts in Arnold.