You may know them as AOV’s or Render passes, or even Render Layers. Whatever the term you use to describe them, they are unquestionably important if you want ultimate control over your image or animations. Adding to his Arnold Renderer training course, Lighting TD Arvid Schneider posts a look into using the AOV’s in Arnold, along with LightGroups.
If you are using alShaders, the physically plausible production shader library for Arnold, Arvid also covers using LightGroups along with AOV’s. These tutorials have become indispensable, now that Autodesk has dropped mental ray for Arnold with the release of Maya 2017.
Arnold uses the term AOV’s, which stands for Arbitrary Output Variables. They are meant as a method to render any shading network into various and different images for compositing. This is all done in the Arnold Render AOV Browser, which provides an easy way to create built-in AOVs for outputting depth, position, motion vectors.
