EVERYTHING to know about RENDER LAYERS in Unreal Engine 5

[@tiedtkeio]

As always, let me know if you've got any question here in the comments! I'll try to reply as quickly as possible. Thanks! 🤗

[@elmoron7396]

Translucent materials will appear on every layer，how to fix it？

[@matrixvfx3299]

I NEED TO RENDER CASTE SHADOW ONLY IN UNREAL ENGINE

[@JoshLange3D]

Is there a way to make an actor a holdout, e.g. ball in a hand?

[@chriswong225]

is that a way to separate the heterogeneous volume (VDB) layer? it sims cannot be sepparate.

[@xVzz]

I'm using 5.4, it seems the layers tab has been disabled? I cannot right click or do anything there.. I really want to use this workflow

[@andrewwelch5017]

If you have ANY Nanite meshes in your scene (not just in the layers your rendering), this won't work. If you do have Nanite objects, disable Nanite by entering the console command "r.Nanite 0" and your layers will render as expected. Once you have rendered your layers, you can enable Nanite again by entering "r.Nanite 1". Hope that helps!

[@tiedtkeio]

Amazing tip! Thank you Andrew!!

[@VirtualSteven]

Your a legend thank you. I have been troubleshooting why my layers were not rendering properly and this was the fix. 😊

[@Purple_Chris]

It does seem to render the Nanite Fall Back mesh this way which has lower quality.

[@axelwilde1081]

OMG!!! I have been searching FOREVER to find a solution to my rendering problem and this solved everything. How I just chanced on this video as a last ditch attempt...and wallah! Thank you so, so much for the tip.

[@NicholasSmall-e7k]

Thank you for the help! - VM student

[@tiedtkeio]

Happy to help! Thanks for watching and hope it helps in your VFX journey! 🙂

[@timmarriott9542]

Thanks so much for this, tiedtke. A couple of questions I'm hoping you can answer. I tried your method to get a depth pass, but the layer has no information in my compositing app. Any idea why that may be? Secondly, when I work in Cinema4D, I'm able to render beauty passes for each separate light that I have in my scene using the light group feature. Is this workflow possible in UE5? I'm looking for a way to render what every light contributes to the beauty, then rebuilding the beauty in post with much greater control over the lighting. Any thoughts on how to do that?

[@mdesignanimationsricardomo513]

Hey man...let me see if I have any luck with this problem and if you know anything about it. Can’t right click or drag items to create new layer, I have not got anything to solve that problem, do you know anything about it? Thanks in advance

[@littlecurrybread]

Exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

[@tiedtkeio]

Excellent! Thanks for watching! 🤗

[@simonflash_edit]

Thanks for this helpful video. It's also great that you mentioned that there's a problem with using nanite meshes, as this saved me alot of time and headaches :)

[@tiedtkeio]

No worries, thanks for watching Simon! Haha yeah, I spent so many hours trying to figure out why some meshes didn't render when others did. Until I figured out it was Nanite hahah..

[@isermanlab]

Very cool! Learned so much!

[@tiedtkeio]

Super Stephan! More information and tutorials regarding this topic is coming! Thanks for watching! 🙂🙏

[@felixmagnusson]

Have you managed to get stencil layers to work in UE 5.1? I've been trying every way I can think of but it just wont output any alpha...

[@tiedtkeio]

I'm discussing how you activate the alpha channel at kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y2m4d6yXpsecfaM, have you followed those steps? And have you either assigned the background i.e. the skydome, height fog, skylight and directional light to a separate layer or just deleted them alltogether? Everything works just fine for me, both in 5.1 and 5.1.1, so we need to find the cause of your issue as it should work haha. 😊

[@andreybagrichuk5365]

Thank U a lot for amazing material man !!!

[@tiedtkeio]

And thank you for watching Andrey! 😊

[@davidratajczak8408]

Hello, I do have a VFX oriented question : is there a way to remove a sky from a render so we can replace it in comp with a matte painting instead ? Like keeping everything we see in Unreal Viewport, including atmospherics, but with an alpha channel for the sky ? Important thing : forest environment : already tried cryptomattes but I do have super annoying artifacts around the leaves Thanks a lot

[@denisann8493]

Hello! If I have several folders with different lights, then how can I hide some of them during rendering?

[@mrhmakes]

Thank you! very informative! But do you by chance have something similar but with post done in davinci resolve? Am curious as to how that might breakdown

[@tiedtkeio]

Thank you! I don't have at the moment, but it's on my to-do list haha. I usually comp in Fusion. Will try to get it done and then tag you! 😊

[@lifeartstudios6207]

is this only for cinematic stuff? Can I use this like unity render queues? I'm working in the mobile LDR space so I have no post process, no depth stencil, no distance fields, etc. I'm trying to do some perspective-based masking, and made some progress by hijacking single layer water's two pass opaque shader, but then translucency renders on top of that so it mess up the depth. IE: Can I use this to change the render order?

[@danodesigndanomotion2068]

I can't render the sky and clouds separately? And if I have an animation in the outliner loaded as a skeletal mesh in a sequencer, how should I render it?

[@qaxt8231]

Hello, which water asset you used?

[@tiedtkeio]

Hi there! I used the built in water plugin from Epic Games.

[@Midz13]

Great video! All of my post process materials are rendering, so they are definitely active, but the renders are always black. Any ideas?

[@andrewwelch5017]

You probably have Nanite meshes in your scene somewhere. Disable Nanite completely by entering "r.Nanite 0" into the Console. Once you are finished rendering your layers you can enable it again with "r.Nanite 1"

[@afssai]

Hey I tried to use the layers in ue5.1 but nothing happens. I drag the mesh inside the layer panel and release and nothing. Can it be any preference setting that I am not aware of?

[@paulfedor9828]

Thank you so much for answerig questions. Been testing UE for VFX procduction shots....and have a forest scene...and couldnt get stencil passes to work. Have you encountered any bugs with Stencil passes...?

[@shivangipriya4153]

is there difference between Layers and Data Layers? thank you

[@Sknueppel85]

Thank you so Much! Great Video

[@tiedtkeio]

Thank you Sebastian for watching! ☺️

[@ThrillDaWill]

They've changed how layers work, this doesnt seem to work anymore. is there a work around for 5.2, or 5.3?

[@tiedtkeio]

Hi, I will look into this using 5.3 and get back to you! :)

[@ThrillDaWill]

thank you@@tiedtkeio

[@marklavania3680]

Quite insightful. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Subscribing!

[@tiedtkeio]

Thanks! Glad you liked it! :)

[@dannydadiwang]

Hi, would transparency work for UE5.4? I have been trying to render using stencil layers but my translucent materials is appearing on all my stencil layers

[@crypt0sFX]

Is there anyway around the nanite issue without disabling nanite?

[@tiedtkeio]

Not that I'm aware of. I've researched this quite a bit, but as of right now, sorry no.

[@crypt0sFX]

@@tiedtkeio Dang. Yeah, I've just been turning nanite off on everything.

[@DariuszMakowski]

You need to unpremultiply alpha with rgb pass and then use alpha over it to use over blending mode correctly.

[@tiedtkeio]

Yes, correct. You think you know stuff, but then you learn more every day haha. 😅 Thanks for contributing!

[@DariuszMakowski]

​@@tiedtkeio oh tell me about it, story of my live... and then you think u know stuff and it still wrong! But this looks like unpremultipled alpha issue. So hopefully that would fix it.

[@niclasfangorn]

Great tutorial! I have a question regarding "Linear color space only" vs "Allow through tonemapper". Should I always use linear if I want to do color adjustments in post or what's the reason? In other tutorials on the topic of enable alpha channel support they use "Allow through tonemapper" but never comments on why.

[@tiedtkeio]

Thank you Niclas!! You can also use "Allow through tonemapper", it doesn't really matter as it's almost the same option. Here's what the official Unreal Engine documentation says: Disabled - Disabled, reducing GPU cost to the minimum. (default). LinearColorSpaceOnly - Maintain alpha channel only within linear color space. Tonemapper won't output alpha channel. AllowThroughTonemapper - Maintain alpha channel within linear color space, but also pass it through the tonemapper. The way I understand it is that Linear Only will render faster than the Tonemapper option, however it's probably an extremely minimal difference in time/performance. 🙂

[@niclasfangorn]

@@tiedtkeio Great - thanks! I'll stick to linear for now. Just swapped from tonemapper to linear so don't want to sit through another session of shaders compiling. :) Keep up the good work, you just got yourself a new subscriber.

[@tiedtkeio]

@@niclasfangorn Thank you! More videos are coming shortly! 🙂

[@MichaelFamily]

Hi. Can u help me pls? I spent all day testing a render passes but my world depth pass, motion vectors are completely transparent - cryptomatte, reflections are fine. I did like epic said in documention, like you show but nothing.

[@sachak]

So I am using Unreal 5.3.2 and set this up exactly as you did in the video with a previous scene. I am using ultra dynamic skys. I have several landscapes etc. I can render the scene fine normally. but as soon as I do a layer setup I get out of memory and the render crashes. I have been at this the entire day, I have deleted pretty much everything out of the scene, landscapes etc. nothing seems to fix this issue. I remove the render layers and do a normal render and its 100% again. I am working on the ASUS Scar 18 Laptop with a 13980HX and 4090 with 32Gb DDR5 ram. This problem only happens when I try rendering layers. I opened another scene and same issue. I tried disabling nanites and that didn't work either. Any idea what the cause could be?

[@Maxparata]

Have you found a fix for that?

[@rendered_useless2093]

Please could you help I'm trying to do this process in Unreal 5.2 but it doesn't seem to be working (we tried on two different systems) When dragging and dropping actors into the layers panel nothing happens, also when we right click in the layers panel nothing happens - no dropdowns or menus or anything Thank you!

[@tiedtkeio]

Strange! I will look into this!

[@Sahudamen]

Nice video 🙌🏻

[@Richard-hx6mi]

I've done this tutorial a few times hoping that I had missed something, but I can't get my passes to show up in nuke. The names are there but the passes aren't showing. Anyone know why that may be?

[@AlmazovS]

Hi! I don't see a background in DaVinci as a layer (Sky). What could be a problem?

[@WardForger]

Is there a way to set the landscape foilages layer as actor/stencil layers for render pass?

[@tiedtkeio]

Yeah you should just be able to drag and drop the landscape actor to its own layer! 🙂

[@WardForger]

​@@tiedtkeio You're missing the point. I can't separate the grass without selecting the whole landscape to set as stencil/actor layers. Is there a custom render pass for auto foilage?

[@veith3dclub]

@@WardForger you couldy try to create that foliage with a tool like GraphNLibrary or ia scatter...

[@DenCG]

Hi, I have this problem, I want to get a cryptomat for the scene, but it has a forest and a fog card, when I output with object ids, the fog cards overlap the forest that is behind, how can I protect them from object ids?

[@roscho-dev]

On my project we wanted to use render/stencil layers, but we needed to have the render rendered in full, so with the background of the other layers present, similar as you would do in the editor by turning on and off layers. Is there a possibility for this?

[@tiedtkeio]

As of now, no, unfortunately not. What you're describing is the way real render layer works, like offline renderers such as Redshift or Cycles, but they don't work like that in Unreal Engine. The closest thing I can imagine is to render several times and for each render turn off "one layer". But then the recreation of the layers in comp feels unnecessarily difficult.

[@E.H.N]

Could this be used to prevent Player hands or gun from meshing through objects? By rendering them separately?

[@paulbarcos]

Anyone knows why my world depth is always empty after the render? I already disabled nanite in my project settings

[@matrixvfx3299]

Great Tutorial, Can we render shadow pass separately? Only caste shadow...

[@b.a.g2073]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/ap6YnYFnfp6aqsUsi=sBF5XeBc2Tk_ZaY_

[@inaizy]

Very useful! I would've appreciated some more software agnostic detail on the layer blending that explains the reasoning, instead of just walking through specific settings there, but this still helped me immensely.

[@mumpay]

great video! haven't seen anyone go over this yet! So far the feature seems super janky though.... metahuman hair doesn't seem to be coming in with the body layers, do you know any workarounds for that? And motion blur seems to cause total mayhem with edges. And unreal's zdepth is such low quality, when it works at all... Would love a more indepth tutorial like this but with more motion (aka moving cam plus moving object on a static set, split out sky, background and object and re-composite). Thank you for the great tut!

[@tiedtkeio]

Thank you! Yes, it's definitely a BETA feature, hopefully they'll include more AOV passes in the near future. Haven't tried hair, will have a look! Motion blur should work just fine as that's one of the main features of the stencil layers though, so that's odd. I will make more tutorials on this subject, great suggestions for content! Thanks!

[@magnusnilsson8427]

Awesome! Thank you!!

[@hablalabiblia]

Where did you get the ships from?

[@tiedtkeio]

Sketchfab.com, just search "ships" 😊

[@andreiblackfish1185]

How can you add the fog to the layers ?

[@lovelettar]

Wow I already feel like changing to unreal , I faced problems like there is no occlusion relationship and contact shadow when layer rendering in blender, which is hard for me to after effects each layer...

[@tiedtkeio]

Yes! Unreal Engine is great! 😍

[@lovelettar]

Thanks for sharing!!🥳@@tiedtkeio

[@Edaurdoo]

when i throw the object onto the layer it just doesnt appear ://, do u know why?

[@mae2309]

Holy. Shitzzle. This was s very good topic.. I will try this on my next project. Thank you

[@tiedtkeio]

Haha thank you Mae for watching! I agree, you can make your renders look sooo much better by using the render layers and then color grade or do composites on each layer afterwards. 🙂🙏

[@3dvisualisatie]

Trying this workaround in 5.2 and cant get it working is that right?

[@kokokrunch9188]

thnks dwight 😀

[@DrBombayOfficial]

I love it!

[@tiedtkeio]

Thank you!!

[@Pratheeshkutty]

Thank you Bro❤🙂....please do a video of multi passes {specular, Diffuse and light maps..etc...} render in UE5.1.🙏❤

[@tiedtkeio]

Yes, coming up! 😍

[@Pratheeshkutty]

@@tiedtkeio Thank you 😊... How to render (multi framed) single exr file in unreal engine for compositing?..

[@tiedtkeio]

@@Pratheeshkutty I show how to render EXR file with multiple frames for compositing at 7:27 😊

[@Pratheeshkutty]

@@tiedtkeio Thank you 😊 🙏

[@Pratheeshkutty]

@@tiedtkeio Hai Bro...when I render my sceane, out put is 119 frames 119 EXR files..How to compaine and compose it?..camera will move little bit front that's the animation only...any solution for this.... Render in UE one EXR for this??

[@paulfedor9828]

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[@paulfedor9828]

Wow so as of now Nanite mesh wont render stencil passes?

[@sybexstudio]

Is this better than cryptomattes when compositing?

[@tiedtkeio]

Not really. You can also get cryptomatte passes in Unreal. I do believe cryptomattes are for indiviual objects though, whereas these render layers can be grouped objects as seen in the video. I guess that's the difference. 😅

[@sybexstudio]

@@tiedtkeio You can add multiple meshes to a folder and render ID’s. Set to folder and they will be combined

[@pxrposewithnopurpose5801]

SHOW US A WAY TO GET SHADOW CATCHERS THANKS

[@b.a.g2073]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/ap6YnYFnfp6aqsUsi=sBF5XeBc2Tk_ZaY_

[@aknittel1]

Anyone try the MRQ nanite in UE 5.2.1? Is it fixed?

[@paulatreides1354]

it's bugged for me in version 5.1 , the layer panels is broken , cannot drag anything in there or right click

[@rendered_useless2093]

same in 5.2

[@cr0uchingtiger]

Mine behaves very strangely. I chose to simply render out one foreground tree and a few meshes that comprise of one character. And that's it. What came out was 3 identical layers, each has the same thing: a bunch of leaves on the ground from the foliage painter and a distant 2d plane. Nothing else renders. There's a fair bit of nanite in the scene, but the character isn't nanite and he's nowhere to be seen.

[@andrewwelch5017]

Disable Nanite completely by entering "r.Nanite 0" into the Console. Once you are finished rendering your layers you can enable it again with "r.Nanite 1"

[@lleerman]

Thanks you! 🙌

[@TheSxW]

what if i dont have Layers in window drop down ?? UE5.3.2

[@TheSxW]

nvm i was being stupid...

[@tiedtkeio]

@@TheSxW Haha 😅😅

[@MuhammadBilal-s3z5h]

Great

[@tiedtkeio]

Thanks for watching my video! 🙂

[@kirill99]

Doesn't work with Niagara((

[@paulatreides1354]

a clown passe would be nice , but no way to do this in unreal as far as i know

[@VladimirShanygin-z1e]

Hello, Bro! Im very surprised, but I cant assign any object in the scene to layer menu, why? also I can't create any layer in project, right/left mouse clicks in layer menu field are not give results, nothing happens..

[@Purple_Chris]

World Settings, turn off enable streaming and then click disable world partition