Add "RGB" pass to View Layer pass list
Currently, having a dedicated view layer for performing just a single pass (e.g. a sole Z buffer pass, with "combined" turned off) still performs ray casting during a render, increasing render times.
For some view layers I just want the Z data - nothing more, nothing less - and separating it out is imperative to filter out e.g. volumes that report a depth of +inf.
This is especially important since the view layer "samples: 1" override trick doesn't work when using compositing nodes.
Having an "RGB" pass listed directly between "Combined" and "Z" on the pass list, that is on by default, would significantly improve this Render Layers for more complicated compositing setups.
5 Comments
All pass additions and view layer additions are more than welcome. We need some love here...
I think this should and can be fully automatic. Currently it isn’t possible due to some legacy code inside the render result and a large upcoming refactor of eevee. So yes we should fix this, not sure if it should be a user option.
Why shouldn't it be a user option? Why should I be forced to perform ray tracing when all I want is depth information?
There is already a user option for it. But they aren't effective due to legacy inside blender. When the legacy is cleaned up it would just work for cycles.
If you only enable the Z-Pass the engine can detect what is needed to render the Z-Pass only. The limitation is inside legacy code not in the render engines. Cycles when run outside blender can render a Z-Pass without doing any raytracing. For Eevee this is also planned, but hasn't been done due to lack of resources and other priorities.
But allowing the user to specify both Z-pass as well as raytracing (RGB) data would allow you to access both in the compositing view without needing to have two view layers. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?
Also thanks for the response, glad to know it's on the radar :)