A Lighting AOV isolates the light source's contribution. Each light pass behaves as if all the other lights in the scene are switched off. You can combine individual lighting passes together to recreate the original render in post, or to further adjust the individual contributions of each light during post. There are three categories of lighting AOVs:

  • Light - These AOVs capture the overall qualities of lights.
  • Direct - Captures only the direct light contribution to a specified light ID.
  • Indirect - Captures only the indirect light contribution of a specified light ID.

The following lighting AOVs are available for each of the three lighting categories of AOVs (Figure 1):

  • Sunlight - Captures the sun's light contribution. This only works when you configure a Daylight environment.
  • Ambient - Captures ambient light from the sky in a Daylight environment, or from the texture in a Texture environment.
  • Light ID - Captures Mesh emitter contributions. Texture and Blackbody emitters have a Light Pass ID pin assigning an emitter to a light pass. It’s possible to assign multiple emitters to the same light pass. If nothing is configured, all emitters contribute to Light Pass 1. See the Light Pass IDs topic for more information.