← All ideas
  • Published 13 Jul 2018

2.8 Collections - Render Proposal - Get back the power of Viewlayers!

In Cycles prior to Blender 2.8 it was possible, to use a displaylayer per renderlayer for final rendering in <b>five ways</b>.
(see attached image)

  1. The displaylayer is included in the rendering.
  2. The displaylayer is not rendered but all containing objects are included in the calculation for reflections, shadows etc..
  3. The displaylayer is completely excluded from rendering.
  4. The displaylayer is used as mask, no reflections, no shadows etc. of the objects within.
  5. The displaylayer is used as mask but with reflections, shadows etc. included in the rendering.


In Blender 2.8 there are in the moment only two ways to use collections (the Blender 2.8 displaylayer equivalent) for rendering! It is only possible to <b>exclude or include</b> them through the outliner rightclick menu, or toggle the camera symbol in the outliner
This behavior mimics the above <b>point 1</b> and <b>point 3</b>.
Only render a collection or not.

<b>Points 2, 4, 5 aren´t possible in Blender 2.8!</b>

It would be a huge drawback in terms of rendering and compositing not to have all five posibilities back in Blender 2.8! So dear developers please add the ability to have at least the five collections render behaviours!

Here is my short proposal!

In the <b>Properties Editor</b> there should be a <b>Collections Tab</b>, as it was before the Code Quest. Mybe this Collections Tab will come back with dynamic overrides?! In this Collections Tab there could be a rendering section with the ability to activate the above mentioned render behaviors.
We also need the abilities in the outliner to set the different Render posibilities per collection. Therefore we need two new collection properieties in the outliner (Ray Visibility and Mask). These options reflect the correlating Collections Render tab options.
There could be three options <b>INCLUDE/EXCLUDE, RAY VISIBILITY and MASK</b>.
With combining them <b>six render abilities</b> could be achieved. This is very minimal, but easy to follow (see attached image).

Thanks to all Blender developers for doing an amazing job! I hope it is possible to get these Blender features back in 2.8!

P.S.: Cryptomates would also be great! 😊

Blender_28_Renderlayer_Proposal_v04.jpg

93.3%

Development Status: Open

Upvote 14 Downvote 1
marcus
13 Jul 2018

4 Comments

robertandri

I asked for the same thing here : blender.community/c/rightclickselect/cLbbbc/ Pablo tried to answer to this but did not understood the actual problem and I hope they will fix this soon ... an answer from the actual developing team: " The plan is to replace this with Dynamic Overrides, which have not been implemented yet."

1
ioanmaier

For digital compositors this feature is of absolute importance. I learned blender because of cycles renderer and this feature with render layers. I hope this solution can be implemented Setting render/view layers would be almost as simple and fast as in 2.7.

sreenivas

Regarding cryptomates : From what I heard, tangent animation has implemented cryptomates for their feature film and we can expect it to land in blender soonish!

guyyl

Thanks Macus for this nice concept to get back what is being lost in 2.8. And thanks to inspire the awesome Blender Developers.