How to Get Normal Map To Work With ai Ambient Occlusion As Custom AOV

[jmccann96]

For starters; I’m on the latest version of Maya as well as Arnold, and I did my texturing in Substance Painter.

Got my shader all hooked up and looking correct.

Got my AOVs setup, and the exr driver setup so it’s rendering all my AOVs.

I have 2 custom AOVs, Object ID and AO. Both are rendering and exporting.

The issue I am having is that I can’t get my normal maps to render in the ai Ambient Occlusion AOV pass or just the AO node itself for that matter.

I have tried several different ways of connecting the normal maps to the AO nodes and none of them seem to work. (displacement is working fine with the AO node)

Here is one routing of my shader

I have tired turning on "alpha is luminance" and using bump2D making sure to turn off the check boxes in the Arnold drop down for the bump2D node. I have tried turning off color to signed in the aiNormalMap node. I've tried inverting, and changing the ordering in the NormalMap node as well.

I have also tried using a completely separate instance of the normal map so that it's not connected to the main shader.

The last thing I tried was to simply use the AO node as the main node and assign it to the model to see if I could get any combinations of the previous troubleshooting list to work on the AO node itself, and not as a custom AOV, but I couldn't get it to work that way either.

I pretty positive I'm not doing something correctly. I would be so grateful for any guidance. Thank you in advance.

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

You need to plug aiNormalMap into Normal Camera on the aiAmbientOcclusion node.

[jmccann96]

Well now I'm feeling really silly. I had been plugging it into the normal and not the normal camera. Thanks man. So many hours I wasted over a mistake so simple.

Thank you so much,

[Sajan_Rana]

Uh this is some ancient thread by now but I tried this and it worked but the problem is when I try taking out "AOVs" from render setting I fall into this problem

It effect all the material normal normal when its not suppose to.

These are my setting

For my AOVs setting with node

I thought maybe its because I use same shader I used for my normal map but it doesn't matter replacing shade to different one simply put me back to ground zero.

My AOVs setting this time.

AO Shader I used this time is called "AO2" (just renamed)

[kaiz3r]

hi Stephen,

how would you reproduce this in katana for example, that doesn't provide a normal camera input ?
thanks