How do I view AOV in Arnold?

[thor98_]

Hello,

I have been struggling very much on understanding how to view AOV's. I'm new to Arnold and I'm running some fairly heavy scenes where I need to reduce noise. I want to view AOV's to quickly identify which component is causing the noise.

Can someone please enlighten me on how to do this. I saw on a Maya thread that it's possible there. Hopefully it's possible on Max too?

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-forum/aov-viewer-for-arnold/td-p/6866224

[madsd]

Render in Active shade , production mode has no option to view AOVs ad hoc.

[thor98_]

Mads, I'm going to check this out later today. Thank you very much. It has been very frustrating to me.

Tak 👍

[thor98_]

I'm a little lost as for setting up AOV's, and I'm talking regular ones like indirect lighting etc. Do I just need to render the AOV in AOV panel, and then render ActiveShade for me to view it?

Or is there more to it? Do I need to set up shaders as well?

Thanks for your help

[madsd · Accepted solution]

Just open the AOV manager window in the render settings.
Then drag and drop the AOV you want to render in the active shader window.

Here I added a couple of different.

You can also write your own custom AOV channels, works very well if you code OSL shaders and so on -->

[thor98_]

Thank you Mads. I have followed your steps and it works now. I'm glad I can finally optimize my scene lighting with your useful information.

One question, is it correct that I must first render the AOV's, and then render ActiveShade to see the channels? Essentially rendering it twice?

[madsd]

Out of 400 render sessions, I use production render 1 time and active shade 399 times.

You will work very slow if you use production mode.

In your case, I would open the active shade, work with the AOV's until they look like what you need, then switch to production mode and copy the AOV settings over, then render those to disk.

Use Active shade as your visual feedback for "anything"

Production mode is only for sticking images out on the disk ~

[thor98_]

Thank you. You have been incredibly useful for me. I'll see if I can get a grasp of AOV rendering for production later. Wouldn't mind having more control over my beauty images in post. For now I'm glad to be able to troubleshoot the grainy images this easily.

Thanks!!

[madsd]

Yes, optimizing for speed involves analysing the AOV's and detect which are noisy, then adjust the settings that directly relates to the noise you see and treat it.

You can also enable adaptive sampling and then use the aa_inverse_AOV to monitor how the threshold in adaptive sampling is handling the case, it works in grey tones, black areas means a lot of resources are used on that area, for example a white wall, you can make the machine focus in on corners and spend less on a wall that cleans fast. Just an example.

[madsd]

The good thing about doing this in Active shade is you can do a crop of a corner and monitor it realtime while moving around render settings and shaders, light settings, you dont need to restart the render, so you can sit and remove the noise on an AOV like this, very fast.

[thor98_]

Thanks Mads. It really cleared up a lot of my confusions with AOV. I will implement it in my workflow going forwards.

👍👍