Arnold AOVs

[Anonymous]

Hello there, i am newbie in aovs and generally in passes. Do i have to render all passes, or only the passes that probably i'm going to use? Secondly i found in the builtin tab the beauty pass which i think is somehow my whole image. Is there any chance to use this in compositing?...i'm going to render in merged exr

Thank you and sorry for my bad english

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

The beauty is the whole image.

You don't have to render all the AOVs. It depends on what you need to do.

You can render a set of AOVs that add up to the beauty:

https://support.solidangle.com/x/rQAnAg

Composing the Beauty AOV

The RGBA beauty AOV can be split into smaller AOVs where each contains part of the lighting. In compositing these AOVs can then be individually modified and added together to get the full beauty AOV.

More AOVs give more control in compositing, but also extra work to handle, and they take up more memory and disk space, especially combined with light groups.

Some example sets of additive AOVs for the full beauty AOV are:

• direct, indirect, emission, background
• diffuse, specular, coat, transmission, sss, volume, emission, background
• diffuse_direct, diffuse_indirect, specular_direct, specular_indirect, coat, transmission, sss, volume, emission, background

Simply adding together such AOVs is all that is needed for the beauty AOV. The albedo AOVs are not needed to reconstruct the beauty AOV, but may be used for example to get just the lighting without the surface texture, by dividing diffuse by diffuse_albedo, or for denoising just the lighting while keeping the texture detail intact.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Stephen Blair and thank you for your immediate answer. One last question. I' m thinking of rendering few important (for me) passes....but the think i don' t get from you answer is that: Am i forced to have the beauty pass?