Entropy Studio acquires Arnold Renderer

Arnold is a global illumination system incorporating modern ray tracing and physically based shading techniques. Arnold offers greater speed, more power and higher quality. This gives studios using Arnold a distinct competitive advantage – especially in big-budget productions.

Over the past few years, Arnold has been used to create unique visual effects in major VFX feature films, animated features, and high-end commercial projects. Sony Pictures Imageworks was the catalyst for the professional adoption of the product and will use Arnold in all upcoming films.

Spaniard Marcos Fajardo is the chief architect of Arnold. The skeleton of what was to become Arnold was started in 1997, when Fajardo was 24. He joined Sony Pictures Imageworks between 2004 and 2009 to develop new system capabilities while maintaining ownership of the software itself. In 2009, Fajardo founded Solid Angle SL in Madrid to house Arnold’s further growth.

Solid Angle has chosen to work “from the top studios down” in a deliberate attempt to manage growth and maintain relationships with high-end partners. The company values its customers  and provides a high level of ongoing support. Entropy Studio will be one of the first to integrate Arnold into its current systems which will dramatically enhance their production render capabilities. 

The name of the software has a unique origin. In many respects, Arnold is an API that allows programs to access it for rendering models and animations created up stream in the process. Thus Arnold was initially called RenderAPI. But in 1999, Fajardo went with two friends to an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, End of Days. Fajardo’s friends imitated Arnold’s Austrian accent from the rear of the theater making the audience laugh. One of his friends suggested he rename his software “Arnold” as a joke. Fajardo says, “So I thought – what the Hell – I will call it Arnold. I did expect to change it but I never did.”

Arnold has been used on many films including Thor, Captain America, The Avengers, Alice In Wonderland, X-Men: First Class, Red Tails,Underworld: Awakening and in several award winning commercials.