Arnold AOVs and rebuilding the beauty pass in After Effects.

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I'm a relatively recent convert to Arnold and I am having some trouble reconstructing a result that matches my beauty pass from the AOVs. I'm rendering direct_diffuse, indirect_diffuse, direct_specular, indirect_specular and reflection AOVs (I have no SSS, refractive materials in my scene) as exr files from Maya 2017, and compositing them in After Effects using Add blending mode (working space is sRGB, not interpreting the renders with any profile), but its just not matching the beauty result. Things just end up too bright in the highlights, the colour is off....yeah, Im sure I am doing something incorrectly.

Any ideas if there's some additional passes which I should be rendering, or a different technique I should be using in the comp to get a correct result?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Jan

[maxtarpini]

Just an hint. If you have indirect_specular you ain't going to need 'reflection' .. they are the same thing.

[faura.space]

Hey, Max! It's is all about Gamma interpretation inside Afx which seems to be quite weird. After you split your exr, go to your Project Settings and set the settings like I've attached. That should fix the issue, but anyway i've killed much time trying to fix that damn thing, but it seems like the problem is on Afx side and blending algorithm. As Arnold uses the linear mode, but Afx engine is more about sRGB I still can't get the exact match for the beauty output 😞 You can also try setting up Arnold Driver to sRGB mode output and see if it works better. I finally found that comping in Nuke or Fusion solves that issue 100%, so I comp my shot in Fusion and then add more fx in Afx.

[Anonymous]

As denni said, but olso you can add a filter called "color profile converter" to the layer if you dont want linearize all the project.