Solid Angle aims to start selling licences of Arnold

[McNistor]

Lots of big (small and medium too) studios adopted it in a very short time. I can't think of a piece of s/w that managed to do that in recent years. If that isn't a "sea change", perhaps I don't know what you mean.

[Kzin]

Good news for sure, unfortunately is a plugin present also in maya. A softimage exclusive would have the same effect it had Vray for max

What scaron said. Plus the fact that Arnold doesn't have a general big advantage against Vray, it is even considered inferior for interior scenes. So it isn't a sea change like when GI hit the industry.

From what people who used it in production say, I'd say that it actually does have a big advantage over Vray. It scales very well with heavy scenes and it doesn't take a big hit as other render engines do when activating the multi-headed beast - dof, moblur, hair, diplacement, etc.

dof is way to slow in arnold (like in most other raytracer, more or less). displacements using the bumpmap fake to be fast, mb is not that fast like many are thinking. so actually only hair stand to be fast. but only if you dont use a real hairshader with glossis and not only direct specular or scattering contribution. it all is how the core handle such things and what optimization you write in. and of course dont use multibounce gi, in that case it will slow done like hell.

what arnold makes good is that you have the features and they basicly working, thats it. it was not the speed, its the environment without fakes or workarounds to make things work together (workarounds for faster rendering is a different thing).