We have light group AOVs (for Surface shaders) in Arnold 5.
Super easy to use.
This is how you do it:
- Create some custom light AOVs (Render Settings -> AOVs -> Add Custom)
- Name it like this:
Use the RGBA_ prefix (or any other built in AOV type like: diffuse_direct_ , sss_indirect_ or anything from the Available AOVs list) and add some custom name to it. This is super important!
For example: RGBA_lightgrp1, the second one: RGBA_lightgrp2 - Select a light and add to a specific light group:
In the AOV Light Group section -> type in the name of light group without the RGBA_ part. For example: lightgrp2
- Do that for every light you have.
You can add multiple lights to a light group of course.
That’s it.
By the way, I found that the “maximum of 8 different light AOVs are supported” is not true. 🙂 You can use more than 8. Maybe Solid Angle not updated the entire documentation yet.
The light groups in Nuke:
Cheers, D
Denes Dankhazi's Blogfolio 
[…] Light Groups and LPE 🙂 […]
Thanks mate. Saying i will like to use a spec and diff aov per lightgroup. Will that be possible?
Thanks again.
Hi Jakob,
Good question. Yes, it is possible.
You can change the RGBA_ prefix to any other AOV type, like:
diffuse_direct_
specular_indirect_
and so on.
For example:
diffuse_direct_lightgrp2
Cheers, D
Thanks for that! Bit confused by the SA documentation, but now I can stop banging my head on the desk.
On the way I found that when I made a custom aov and then renamed it in the render settings, the original name remained in the Outliner, but Arnold will ignore this in favour of the new ‘user’ one
Jakob,
A big thanks! You helped me figure out the light AOVs. The SA documentation is a bit thin.
Great site.
Ian
Legend