my only advice with arnold realtime is put an ai colorcorrect on your image and pump the satution to 100
to see if the correct shader is assigned to your material in the firstplace, and wether you actually have a realtime link to the viewport panels or arnold render panel, because with arnold assigning a shader to geo and getting a realtime update is a hit and miss update affair…it seems unstable in this most crucial of areas
maya arnold colorspace issues ie
you load a normal map starts in srgb, you set raw, do your work and it has reset to srgb…why?
then you get error messages about different color spaces for same normal file.
repeat these same errors for raw substance maps, and hdr…
what is going on are you supposed to tick ignore color space rules,
and what conversion does arnolds tx file use, srgb, raw, or the srgb it defaults to later…
get to see your normal maps and same texture maps in different colour spaces
free of charge, and figure out why the same exact texture map looks darker in the render,
why because maya arnold doesnt know…its says it gave the texture map a different color space when you did not.
then try loading in old mental ray files gamma stuck in 2.2 and hdr exposure too dark…and you cannot fix at all in arnold
have to drag and drop the file into an empty arnold scene to fix…
Worst of all, because you think you are updating your shader when you are not
there is a mismatch doing a maya scene in arnold shaders between the realtime viewport arnold, and the seperate arnold renderer viewport first time doing a maya scene, but the error will disappear when you reopen the maya scene…but because it fixes itself when you reopen the maya scene …
ie you cannot trust at all what you see in the 4 pane maya viewport arnold renderer, updates to the shader seem ok till you switch to the arnold renderer viewport and see something completely different…
ie kind of useless at its actual job “realtime.”…
i think part of the problem is mayas hypershade does not automatically show all connections in a shader unless you select all the assigned shaders and press up down links, especially on aimix shaders, and instanced sg shaders.
that and assigning ai shaders to geo doent seem to actually work in normal hypershade ways half the time.
and that with arnolds tx format not updating everytime, or getting confused if you use the same texture map in different folders…leads to chaos…hence my opening statement pump sat to 100% see if you have a realtime connection.
i would only 100% trust what i saw saving the scene and restarting maya…ugh!
have arnold solved the bad noise issue…no…there denoise equals a smeared render
if you combine this with mayas exceptionally slow uv editor on large face count geo, ie unwrapping, uv sets assign and delete ,unfold u v, all i can say is you will be waiting a longtime to see “realtime” accurate updates. might as
well turn undo and history off to save the operators face in front of the angry boss
blender cycles is better at the realtime viewport, quicker more accurate and less pixellated,
though uv editor in blender is way worse functionwise, but quicker at what functions it has.
blender cycles is less noisey than arnold, and blenders denoise is better, but cryptomatte is way
better in arnold all being on one layer…noises are better in blender more variety …
i cant stand mayas NON infinite always tiles noise offerings…
arnolds noise offerings…only two?