One of the most practical use cases for the recently added Global Texture AOV is the ability to save custom Attribute AOVs - without having to inject nodes into your material setups etc.
For example in this case I have 3 independent models, with their own materials etc.
But maybe I would like to have some kind of custom part attribute exported as an AOV. In this case I added a “myCustomAttribute” - and currently it’s being visualized as @Cd. The attribute is the same for each mesh (same name and same type → vertex)
Example File: Custom Attribute AOV pass via Global Texture AOV
To get this custom attribute into a custom AOV all I have to do is:
Then on the Octane Render Setup/ Render Target under the AOV/Custom tab enable one of the Global Texture AOVs
And inside - next to the matching global texture node plug in a vertex color attribute/greyscale attribute node (depending on if your attribute is a color or a float) with the name set to your attribute
Now in your IPR you should see a new Global Texture AOV - showing your attributes:
Notes:
While I used a color in this case you could also use int values for a custom ID map (will still write as RGB AOV passes). Just note that there is a limit to this when exporting exrs. Since they are floating point values the accuracy starts degrading at values over 200k (with rounding you could probably keep going over 600k).
Custom AOV with 300001, 300002, 300003 values, result in precision loss - but could still be safely rounded to a precise int value.
Custom AOV with 600001, 600002, 600003 values, result in precision loss. Could probably still be rounded to get a precise int value, but probably not much higher.
IMPORTANT: This workflow ONLY works for geometry attributes (so point/vertex attributes). This will not work for attributes that are on a packed instance or instance pointcloud