Arnold Rendering with viewport materials advise..

[nintenjo64]

Hi All,

We use Arnold to render a lot of our content which is great and generally works ok. However due to the way arnold works we generally cant see any of our materials in the max viewport..  We have generally tried to stick with Arnold compliant nodes so that we can use the GPU rendering but this includes OSL nodes. 

Trouble is some arnold nodes such as 'Curvature', 'Ambient Occlusion' and even UVW (OSL) for vertex colors simply dont work in the viewport. 

Here is an example materials we might have setup, which renders fine, but makes the viewport virtually redundent for any editing other than polygon information.

I should be clear i am no expecting arnold nodes to work in viewports however wondered if there is a way to have approximations of the materials so you can at least see bitmaps, color correction etc for generaly balancing, uv editing function. With the more advanced features like curvature only being visible in renders?

How do other people work with Arnold for rendering whilst still retain a decent modelling / texturing workflow? I considered Active Shade viewports but they are so slow you cant really use them for anything that requires quick iteration IMO.

[CiroCardoso3v]

I could be wrong, but Curvature and AO are calculated at rendering time, that is the reason why even with an Ambient Occlusion OSL isn't supported in the viewport as you can see here

Usually, the lookdev of assets should be done before scene assembly, which will improve massively the viewport and scene performance.