Render AOVs but not beauty?

[Joshua_Mock]

Is it possible to set up render layers to only render the selected AOVs without also wasting resources by rendering the beauty pass? Specifically, we'd like to be able to only render the shadow pass (similar to Renderman) without also having to get a beauty pass.

[Shawn_Kearney1]

The closest I've gotten was to set the beauty to a flat color and just exclude beauty from the driver. I am not sure if the beauty still renders or not, since I've always done this while rending to the C4D picture viewer (I did it this way so I could easily watch the progress of the render). Other hosts might be different, and I am guessing if I use the render queue or disabled the display driver then excluding the beauty pass from the active driver the beauty pass would not be evaluated. But I am not sure.

[Shawn_Kearney1]

can anyone confirm a solution for this?

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

In most of the plugins, it's not possible to disable the beauty, so you always get the beauty AOV

[Shawn_Kearney1]

if this is something we could possibly have at some point it'd be really great.

I use a float AOV in a current project to highlight elements in an infographic, and using this in post as a matte to apply color.

If we receive a note that the highlight should fade in or out at a different time, we either need to re-render the entire project, or set up a specific override so that the beauty pass evaluates quickly.

[Joshua_Mock]

After speaking with Maya's tech support, it appears that it is not possible to disable the beauty pass for AOV / render layers as they are mathematically bound to each other. I ended up just assigning a flat shader as Shawn suggested to reduce overall render time for those layers where I didn't need textures (shadow_matte, ID, etc.)

[Tyler.Matthew.Harris]

This is ridiculous. All I need is an ID pass.

[Shawn_Kearney1]

At first it seems this way, but it makes sense. The camera has to cast rays to get the aov. Thats just how Arnold (and any other unbiased renderer) works. What i would suggest is to set up an override specific for this purpose. If all you need is an object matte you can turn down your samples pretty low, and you obviously wouldnt need any bounces.