Hey everyone!

I've managed to set up some AOVs/Render Outputs, and they seem to be properly appearing in my solaris viewport rendering with Arnold.

The only real issue i'm running into is with regards to the first AOV that gets displayed when I switch from Houdini GL >> Arnold.

It seems to pick the AOV at the top of the list, which is ordered alphabetically. RGBA is my "beauty" AOV, but since some other AOVs are ordered above this alphabetically (eg. "N") I find myself having to manually change the render output to RGBA every time I start a render.

Is there any way to designate a specific Render Output as the "default" or "beauty"? Maybe there is a specific Render Output name that's being listened for?

Thanks in advance!

If you have a render settings prim, the list of render products is "ordered", and on each render product, the list of render vars (AOVs) is also "ordered". The ordering of that AOVs menu to the right of the viewport respects the ordering of render products and render vars specified on these USD prims. If "color" is not found among the available AOVs, the viewport defaults to showing the "first" one in the list. Thus you can control with LOP nodes which AOV gets shown in the viewport by default.

Thanks for that mtucker, after taking the time to understand what’s going on here, this worked perfectly!

Just in case anyone else was as confused as I was at first glance:

• When listing the Ordered Render Vars in the Render Product LOP, I had, without giving it much thought, simply used a wildcard ( /Render/Products/Vars/* ) to catch all of the render vars / AOVs / render outputs
  
• Using a wildcard here implies an automatic sorting, so I had no control over what appears at the top of the list. I hadn’t realised that the order mattered (yeah I know… it’s kind of obvious in hindsight considering the parm name)
  
• To get what I wanted, I just had to explicitly state the AOV that I wanted to be picked up by default by Solaris (my beauty) as the first entry. So, because the Arnold Standard Render Vars LOP creates a Render Var “RGBA” to represent the beauty by default, I just had to list it like so in the Ordered Render Vars parm:
  
• /Render/Products/Vars/RGBA /Render/Products/Vars/*