Hi,
It would be so great if mantra supported exclusive AOVs in a future version.
See the following example for an “exclusive AOV”. Essentially the user should be able to specify which objects she wants in a deep raster.
Say you have sphereA with shaderA writing into AOVA, and you have sphereB with shaderB writing into AOVB. Currently sphereA would still write to AOVB, but only appear as a black hole. By implementing this feature, the user could specify to exclude sphereA from AOVB completely.
This would have a slight overhead as the renderer would need to shade the stuff behind sphereA (supposing that's over sphereB), but still would save a lot of time/organisation effort.
Please see another renderer for extra information:
http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_49.html [3delight.com]
http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_48.html#SEC128 [3delight.com]
