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  • Published 27 May 2020

Blender "-L" command line option for selecting render layer

Rendering using Blender's command line is great. Less crashes, slight speed gains, and it allows rendering using scripts and from remote servers using SSH.

What sucks is there is no way to render multiple layers using the command line. The "-o" option doesn't allow you to set different filepaths for different layers, so rendering multiple render layers on a remote server for later compositing is literally impossible.

I already have a script that goes through and generates a shell script to render all scenes in a file to their own folders which is pretty easy using the "-S" command. If there was a "-L" command which allowed the user to specify the render layer, it would allow somebody to easily render different layers to different paths.

EX:

blender -b myFIle.blend -S myScene -L layer1 -o mySceneFolder/layer1Folder/layer1_ -a

blender -b myFIle.blend -S myScene -L layer2 -o mySceneFolder/layer2Folder/layer2_ -a

Also to be clear, MultilayerEXR is not the solution as it only stores the sub layers (Alpha, depth, etc) on a single render layer to the output file, and there is no way to include other separate render layers.

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 3 Downvote 0
zhixson.xbdi
27 May 2020

1 Comment

lsscpp

the only workaround i can think of is swetting a python script to be used in the command line, but you have to specify the layer name in each python script, and becomes clumsy to set it to a variable (an array for example for batch renders)