refracting aovs in karma

 make a custom attribute, i've called it poso2, i'm hijacking the Position value for this & fitting it between 0 and 1.

in karma, use the geompropvalue to load it in to the shader. here i use a mtlxdot because apparently it doesn't change the value of the attribute (?).  i plug it into a karma aov thing and name it "poso", using the $OS. Here i'm using the float value to drive a colour ramp.

In the render settings, aov section, scroll down to "extra render vars" and add one. put in your name - "poso" in our case. set format to color3h and data type to color3f.
The source name is :
C<TG>.*L
and Source Type is LPE.

I actually used the settings created when you select Glossy Transmission for this, then changed the name to Poso. Seems to work though!

cryptomatte AOV with arnold/HTOA

Another simple thing, which I always forget.

The most common crypto attribute I use is crypto_asset.
It seems to work best assigned at primitive level. So - in a primitive wrangle for example -

s@crypto_asset="poop"+itoa(@primnum);


The next part is to create an Arnold Shader Network, call it something like "CRYPTO"
Inside this, make an AOV Output  node. Create a cryptomatte node and hook this up to the aov_shader input. You may need to create a user_data_string with "crypto_asset" and plug that into the "crypto_asset" input of the cryptomatte node.


The last bit, is in the Arnold ROP you're using. In the AOV section, where it says "AOV Shaders", point it to they CRYPTO shop you made earlier -  /shop/CRYPTO

then add a new AOV and select "crypto_asset" from the list.

Hopefully this works!

Crypto_object is used when things are in different Houdini Objects... it isn't something that I usually do though..

seperated AOVs eg(z depth at 32 bit)

Half precision and 32 bit for z depth 

16 bit half precision but utility passes in 32 bit. 

- on your AOV, tick Separate File
- set the filepath to the same location as your beauty render but with the name of the pass suffixed, e.g. for the Z depth it might be: _$HIP/../../render/$OS/$HIPNAME/`$OS`_Z.$F4.exr_
- set Precision to 'Float 32 bit'