Rendering smooth wireframes in Arnold

How to render smoothed wireframes of a model with Arnold in Maya.
00:00 Intro
02:40 Using Arnold's wireframe shader
05:18 Using the Utility shader with the Toon shader instead
15:10 Setting up wireframe renders without changing the model

[@GoopyGoblins]

Thank YOU! dude... have been throwing my stuff into marmoset for the wireframe... because everytime I search this there are like 5 other videos that come up that only show AIwire or some form of it... so many people on artstation were clearly using arnold and i was going crazy trying to figure it out... got as far as using the utility node myself... but didnt put the rest together... YOUR AWESOME!

[@starsapphire191]

This was soooooo helpful! Thank you! Ive been struggling with this 'issue' the whole day. Wish more videos from you.

[@florianschanen7193]

I managed to render an awesome looking turntable for my character thanks to your tutorial Thank you ! That was very helpful :)

[@alexschmidt1114]

Awesome tutorial, do you have an idea of how to change that line thickness?

[@_Master_Wolf]

Thank you very much! I used to render smooth wireframes in V-ray and couldn't figure out how to do it in Arnold.

[@xyoonzx5364]

Thank you so much! You are my hero

[@kevkas]

Very helpful video, aiWireframe automatic smoothing was driving me crazy and I was trying to figure out how to have the wireframe look like the actual smoothed model, not the smoother model PLUS the smoothing that aiWireframe adds. One thing I would like to ask you if I may: so you created the render layer, you put everything else in the 'other' collection in the video, and then another collection for the model. At 17:15 you reassined the original material to the lamp, so my question is: how does the render layer know what models to apply the aiToon (which you renamed to aiSmoothCage) to? Say you have a lamp, a car and a table, and all of them have their own materials applied to them (three different aiStandardSurface let's say), when you enable the render layer you created, will it apply that aiToon to all the models? or to just one? (if so: which one?) That's the only thing I got lost trying to understand in the video, aside from that very interesting. ---------- Edit1: ok, I just realized at 16:10 when you wrote |model_GRP|* that's the actual name of the object, so I see that's how you are letting the layer know what to apply the override material to. I still have a question though, is there a way to include the Arnold filter change (from gaussian to contour) as part of the layer? maybe there's a way to include the filter change as well so that I don't have to manually change it for rendering wireframes specifically (since the default arnold filter is gaussian and I would like to leave it as default) ---------- Edit 2: I found a solution to my question above, I'll leave it here in case it helps someone in the future. So in order to not have to manually change the Arnold filter to 'contour' everytime, leave the filter at whatever value you want in the render settings, and we'll manage that change from inside the same layer created in this video. Inside the layer, create another collection (I called it contour_filter) and change the 'Collection Filters' from 'Transforms' to 'All' (it's the dropdown list), then in 'Include' write: defaultArnoldFilter. After doing that, right-click on that collection and 'Create Absoluto Override', give it a name (I called it 'applyContourFilter') and in 'Type Attribute' write: aiTranslator and you should get a field in which you can manually write what filter you want, just write: contour in that field and that's it, your entire layer now applies the filter as well.

[@roelkokpro]

Glad you were able to figure it out. And thanks for sharing the tip regarding the filter!

[@aviv32]

thank you for the tutorial! is there a way to control the aitoon line width? since the lines are a bit to big for me, and u cannot see the smaller polys , since it just painting them in full black

[@michaelc2610]

Hey Roel, this tutorial is awesome, really is so difficult to achieve this result in any other way. Thank you for making this video! I do have a issue though. Everything renders out fine, but it does not seem to give me a solid shape of my mesh when I switch to an Alpha (it only shows the wireframe on the Alpha Channel) this makes it difficult to do some post editing in Photoshop afterwards. I know PNG saves out alpha, but when I change the file extenstion to .png it saves only the wireframe. Is there any specific settings you can suggest to get a solid white shape of any geo instead of the wire when you want an alpha saved on a single image

[@roelkokpro]

That's because of the contour filter. There is not really a convenient way around this afaik. I believe the official recommended workflow is to render a beauty pass without contour filter (ie no edges) and one with the box filter for the edges and comp them later in post. See: help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_user_guide_ac_toon_ac_toon_aovs_html