
With these changes, you may be concerned that many of your existing Mental Ray Scenes will be incompatible with these newer technologies. Unfortunately, out of the box Arnold is unable to offer background processing (network rendering, render farm functionality), and requires additional licensing to do so. In fact, Arnold was honoured by the Academy with a Sci-Tech award last year (2017).

With the acquisition of the Arnold render engine, and the development of the Autodesk Raytracer (ART) you have the ability to continue to create and output high quality work using these technologies. Whilst this has proved difficult for some users and caused some controversy, there is a positive side to this decision. As of the 2018 release, Autodesk 3ds Max is missing the NVIDIA Mental Ray Renderer.
