AOV write has a passthrough and an AOV input. It looks like this WAS possible to write a standard surface as the AOV output, but that functionality got removed in Arnold 5. You can now only write a vector.
Just bringing up an old question to see if there is a solution since some time has passed. I've looked through most of the old threads and didn't find anything.
https://answers.arnoldrenderer.com/questions/10384/render-a-material-to-an-aov-nothing-fancy.html
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by Stephen.Blair. Go to Solution.
Gotcha - thanks! Do you foresee this being implemented in some other way to achieve the same goal of rendering a standard surface to an AOV?
What's the use-case where you need this AOV for?
As a workaround you can set an id in the standard surface shader rendered to an AOV which you can use as a mask in post.