Light groups - Collections
There is this new "light groups" feature. Great stuff. However, I think their implementation is questionable.
Collections have replaced groups everywhere in blender since their introduction. So, Light groups should also be collections to keep it consistent.
You place your lamps or emission objects into collections, you mark the collections as light groups. Done. I think that makes more sense.
6 Comments
it would be good to have light collections which can bring up a matrix for collections and objects which you can turn on/off with a checkbox that correlates between the relationship of lights to objects, it could be similar to how the filtering works in collections.
Can you explain to me in great detail #1 EXACTLY what groups used to be in Blender and #2 how exactly collections differ from them?
Before 2.8 there was no such thing as collections. What we had was "layers", exactly 20 of them. You couldn't name them, delete or add more.
Groups before 2.8 were called "Groups", in the Object properties tab, you could set which named groups the object belongs to. Basically, it was like tagging an object with a label. The outlines of objects became green when they were in a group. You could add instances of whole groups. Groups were used for instancing a particular set of objects as particles, and similar.
When 2.8 was released, Render layers and groups were merged into one thing - Collections. And now you could add collections into other collections, which you couldn't do before. Also, Collections can be used for a lot more things. For example, there was never such a thing as a boolean modifier where the whole group was the operand.
Now that Light groups are a thing, they seem to be using the dated concept of grouping objects back again.
I'm an amateur so I've never actually used Render Layers myself so I accept your description of how things changed/merged there. But my investigations into 2.79 vs 2.80 suggest to me that the old "groups" were actually "collections" all along.
In the Object properties tab you can set which named collections the object belongs to and also where the origin point of each collection should be when it is used as an instance.
You can add collection instances of whole collections .
Collections are used for instancing a particular set of objects as particles and etc.
Other than merging render layer stuff into collections I honestly don't see how collections are different from groups. Then when you look at the old addons that gave you a hundred layers that you could name and delete, it seems layers were also collections all along.
Basically, "Collections" is what happens when render layers and groups did the dragon ball fusion dance, and the fusion of the two became more powerful than just the sum of the two.
You can absolutely say that Collections ARE groups, and you can say that Collections ARE render layers. But groups are not render layers. You couldn't hide a group in the viewport or final render, set a group to be "Holdout" or "Shadow catcher" or only render indirect light of it... You couldn't place groups into groups and those groups into other groups...
If you want a deeper explanation on groups and collections:
devtalk.blender.org/t/layers-maniphest/6578