Arnold AOV support

Scene Manager Wishlist & Feature Requests
#1

Hi there,
the Pulze package has started supporting Arnold lately, but there doesn’t seem to be support in Scene Manager to pass on the AOV setup to Render Manager, the only output being a single-layer exr from 3dsMax’s common output.

I can either start baking .max setups to be loaded back to Render Manager to render the AOVs, but that kinda defeats the purpose of using Scene Manager.

I also tried exporting .ass Arnold files, as RM accepts them, but then I get an error message in RM, saying the render node is missing Arnold standalone.
(Never managed to figure out what the problem actually is, there is no such thing as an Arnold standalone installer, max comes with it out of the box, not sure how I am supposed to tell RM how to use Arnold itself without the max interface)

So, Arnold support is great, but seems to be lacking at this point. Are there more features planned in this direction?

And just a side note: as more and more render engines get supported, the same modules are shown in SM, eg. I can see Vray’s raw output module while using Arnold and so on.
It would be nice for SM to automatically hide the modules that are not applicable to the software being used.

Thanks

#2

Edit:
Scene Manager actually does hide modules that are not applicable to the render engine being used, sorry about that.
It does not remove modules that are already added to the UI though.

#3

Hi @vszemes,

Thanks for sharing your issues. Yes you are definitely right the Arnold support is not in pair with other engines in Scene Manager. Later on when we move to other platforms or industries where Arnold is more important we will have proper support for AOV-s for sure.

As for the standalone thing. It could be confusing, but when we say standalone we mean the kick.exe that comes with Arnold, which is a standalone cli where you can render your ass files. In order to make it work you should have one of the following environment variables pointing to the folder where kick is installed: “ARNOLD_BIN_PATH”, “ARNOLD_STANDALONE_PATH”, “KICK_ASS_PATH”

Hope this helps!

#4

Hi @peter.sarhidai,

thanks for the reply, I managed to make RM render Arnold scenes.
Baking .max files from the scene manager seems to be the best option for now.

For anyone interested, since Arnold comes with Max out of the box, the environment variables need to point to the Arnold plugin location, which is (for a typical installation) usually located here:

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins\MAXtoA_20XX\bin\

Cheers and thanks again Peter!