Working With Arnold AOVs and Maya’s Render Setup

If you are just starting out with rendering, it can be difficult to keep a lot of the technical details in your head. Putting aside the settings and technical stuff you need to make a render, there are also render passes and render layers to consider. Render layers in Maya is a bit of an antiquated term, being pushed out by the new Render Setup panel in more recent versions. What is the difference between rendering “layers” or rendering AOVs or components?

Learn how to render using Arnolds AOV (Render Passes) system and how you can customize your own Render Elements by using the new Render Layer in Maya 2017

Arnold has the ability to render out passes, called AOV’s (Arbitrary Output Variables). AOV’s offer a way to render various components of the image. Arnold provides a lot of standard AOVs for spitting out positions passes, motion vectors, depth and the like. Some of these can be set up through Maya’s Render Set too? so what is the deal?

3D Artist Yone Santana walks us through everything you need to know about render setup and AOVs when working with Arnold. This includes what each method offers, and you can choose one method over another.