Blender Render Basics: Splitting into Layers for Ultimate Control

[@valtabohm]

Tyvm bro, I'm always looking around for this type of content cuz it's soooo useful. Thx

[@AnsonSavage]

Nice! Instead of holdout, you could also have used indirect so that you don't have to add a black layer in the background. Thanks for the tutorial!

[@EgoMotionCG]

Am glad to help. Got it! Thanks for the advice mate :)

[@herrremo]

where do you enable this "indirect" setting? thanks in advance

[@cosmicfish1000]

@@herrremo in the Outliner there is that "funnel" looking button (immeditaly right of the search bar in the outliner). Click on that and under "Restriction Toggles" it's the last button on the right, looks like an arrow deflecting off a surface. Switch that on. Then it'll appear beside your Collection boxes. You can activate it from by selecting on and off the arrow.

[@herrremo]

@@cosmicfish1000 amazing, thanks my friend, I was ignoring that button until now, very useful. Have a great day! Cheers

[@mikerusby]

nice tutorial. i have always put off learnng this, but that was very helpful thanks

[@EgoMotionCG]

Thanks man!

[@bUildYT]

haha stumbeling across ur videos more n more often, good stuff dude!

[@herrremo]

beautiful way to explain this, I thank you for this my friend. Really good explanation.

[@EgoMotionCG]

Thanks man, am happy to help :)

[@KelseyNecowitz]

In Maya render layers, you have the ability to override attributes per layer. Does Blender offer the same mechanics?

[@EgoMotionCG]

To the best of my knowledge, I have not heard of anything like this. I would have to know how that works in Maya to know how to extrapolate it to Blender. I know that in the latest versions of Blender you can assign AOVs to objects or materials, or even groups of lights. You also have cryptomatte passes that can help a lot to manage certain things when compositing.

[@learningforever957]

Very useful and well explained, thank you friend!

[@EgoMotionCG]

Am happy to help ♥

[@mikerusby]

so if I have my characters/cars on separate layers, they have to cast shadows and be affected by the other object in the scene. is it best to have the characters/cars with their own shadow catcher plane or just cast the shadows on the existing background?

[@EgoMotionCG]

yeah!, insted of holdout, cast shadows.

[@nehilvasuwal]

the edges are not clean in my instance. there are white dots going around. any solutions?

[@RedneckRedoubt]

To address the white dots (if it is in your final render) it sounds like you are using cycles and you're not using the either the denoiser and/or not letting it render enough samples. Denoising is situation dependent and can make renders worse, especially animations. Also check to see if your noise threshold in the render (not viewport) tab under the render settings is set to a lower level or off entirely because once that limit is hit it will stop rendering on that tile and move on. The limit is great for speeding up renders if you don't want to fight with samples settings and are satisfied with the output at a particular threshold. Another small tip for using cycles is while rendering in dark/ enclosed places it will generate a lot more "fireflies" or white specs that don't resolve out. Rendering through transparent windows or light coming into an enclosed place through a transparent window will produce large amounts of fireflies as well. If you want more information blender guru does a good explanation of cycles rendering optimization on his videos, especially the kitchen video. Best of luck.

[@olengluibabe]

Is it possible to add aov passes to the output renderlayer and render out correctly?

[@davorcelar3306]

on your phone passes, you don't want to hide the ground as it contributes to the shading of the phone as evidenced by your brighter phones in your final composite. Is there a way to include the ground in the calculations of the phone pass but not render? (in Maya it's a simple as turning primary visibility off) Good tutorial by the way. thank you

[@EgoMotionCG]

Thanks man! You can do that by clicking the object (in this case, the floor) and going to the object properties tab, scroll down to the visibility section and check off the camera ray visibility. The object will remain visible in diffuse, glossy and shadow visibility, but wont be visible to the camera.

[@davorcelar3306]

@@EgoMotionCG that does make sense, but in your case, if you had different layers, blender doesn't seem to obey them. If you turn off camera ray, how do you keep that for only the one layer you are on and not affect them all?

[@EgoMotionCG]

@@davorcelar3306 Well, there is always a way to find a way, with holdout, with camera ray or even with shadow catcher. You can duplicate the collection of the floor: have one in a layer where it is visible to the camera and another where the camera ray is disabled. I haven't tried it haha maybe my theory doesn't work, but I know it can be done somehow with the options available.

[@danmusiceasy]

Thanks for the tutorial! I'm having a small problem - when I have a view layer with a landscape object and a background image, Blender renders the landscape object as a separate image and the combined image or the landscpae plus background image separately? They are both in a single collection on a single view layer. I'm using an Alpha Over node to combine the background with the rest.

[@EgoMotionCG]

Thank you! Ah bro I didn't understand the case, but I think you can solve it by placing the objects on separate layers. If that doesn't work, plz explain it to me again.

[@uknownsubject]

If you do it like this you loose the reflections and the rest of interaction between the objects , you can see in your final render there is not reflection on the sides of the phones

[@pansitostyle]

so, it would triplicate the render times since we'd be doing layering, right?

[@EgoMotionCG]

The render time will increase but not necessarily triple, each layer will have its own render time. It could be even more or even less.

[@brainmold]

The main reason to do this is to get more control over the different elements in your image when you composite them together. You are also able to make tweaks in blender to one item without having to render the whole image, if you're doing longer animations this can save a huge amount of render time, you can even use different render settings per layer to speed things up.

[@kamylo777]

Keep this up bud!

[@stormk-1130]

I just want to render one obj. Not the whole scene. This work too?

[@EgoMotionCG]

Yeah, maybe, just put yout object on one collection and tun off all the other collections.

[@this_is_odin_show]

does it work with animation?

[@EgoMotionCG]

Yep