HOW DO I CHANGE THE BACKGROUND COLOUR WHEN RENDERING WITH ARNOLD?
Although the quality is nowhere near the level we can achieve since the introduction of Arnold renderer, Maya’s hardware rendering was always easy to use. It wasn’t bloated with overcomplicated sliders and attributes so you could usually achieve a half-decent render without too much of a headache.
What you saw in the viewport was pretty much what you got, but you had to wait to see all the fancy lighting and shading that was added during the rendering process. Even something as simple as changing the colour of the background was straightforward. All you needed to do was adjust the camera’s Background Colour attribute under the Environment settings. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case with Arnold.
I don’t render that often as I usually work with clients who need something built, rigged, or animated that they can then render themselves, but occasionally I like to render out a piece for my portfolio, so I need full control of the overall image including what’s behind it. The problem is, when using Arnold to produce the image, it ignores the Background Colour setting of the camera, so the environment remains black, which is frustrating. So with this being the case, how do you change the background colour?
Instead of focusing on the camera’s attributes, what you actually need is an airayswitch node. If you look in the Arnold Render options, in the Render Settings under the Environment tab you will see a Background (Legacy) option. If you click on the swatch to its right, it will give you the option of creating various environment nodes: a Sky Shader, a Physical Sky Shader and a Rayswitch Shader.
If you choose to connect a new Rayswitch Shader to your background, you will be given an airayswitch node, within which you can adjust the background colour through the Camera attribute. This could be something as simple as making a colour change, but you can also point the Camera attribute to a specific image file or an image sequence should you be rendering an animation.