Hi,
we're currently trying to translate our workflows into Solaris/Karma and wanna set up a standard set of AOVs.
In general no biggy with the standard ones and LPEs. But Im kinda struggling to build custom shader AOVs, like Arnold has.
Lets say i want to add a facing ratio AOV, how would i feed that into Karma?

Thanks a mil and best regards!

Add them to the material using the karma aov node or the mtlx dot node. AOVs must be inline with the material network, so they either have to be connected to unused shader inputs, or connected to a switch node to use it's multiple inputs as dummy inputs.

hi thank you for your answer! But that means in the end a global shader overrides as AOV (greyshader on everything) only work if that override gets literally added to all materials in the scene? In other render packages im kinda used to able to hand in a shader as AOV, or am I missing sth here?

kernberg
hi thank you for your answer! But that means in the end a global shader overrides as AOV (greyshader on everything) only work if that override gets literally added to all materials in the scene? In other render packages im kinda used to able to hand in a shader as AOV, or am I missing sth here?

I'm not sure what you mean by shaders as an AOV. AOVs are of shaders. Do you mean replacing all the materials in the scene with a gray material?

basically a shader override stored in AOV. When I get back to the example of a facing ratio AOV, I wouldnt know how i would do that except overriding the material into a seperate render or, as you said storing that in all materials of the scene

I'm also trying to figure out if this is impossible in Solaris -- even within classic Houdini ROP context you could add an Arnold AOV shader with additional global aovs:


Makes it very annoying to add something like a global AO pass when you've got many referenced assets and materials, unless there is another way of doing this I'm not seeing. Maybe some kind of edit node affecting all materials in the scene? I haven't figured out a way to structure it that works yet though.

Hey! quick bump to check if anyone got a tip / new workflow on this one that would match an AOV shader behaviour?