I’m quite certain I’ve seen a Collections proposal in RightClickSelect which adequately accounts for visually tagging layers (Exclude, Indirect Only, Holdout, Mask) to create custom render passes.
However, I can’t find it.
More importantly, I’d like to know if this going to implemented for the 2.80 final release, because the rendering toolset in 2.80 is, frankly, completely unfinished without it.
2.79 used to do this nicely. The only (somewhat glaring) deficiency was the hard limit on number of layers.
Currently in 2.80, excluded layers can be visually identified since they appear with grayed out names, and the E / ALT+E keyboard shortcut is useful, too. However, the only way to determine if a layer is set to Holdout or Indirect Only is to right click on it and check the View Layer sub menu. Worst of all, there is absolutely no way to set a layer as a mask, afaik.
I think some of this will be part of https://developer.blender.org/T61578 – which is marked as High Priority and one of the design bugs they want to address by middle of May. It’s not clear to me how it will ultimately land though.
I don’t believe anything on rightclickselect is used (formally) at this stage of the process, but perhaps some of the ideas there flowed in to the real bugs that are being used.
It doesn’t really address the Layer Renderability stuff tho
Still, I’m optimistic, since all features that already existed in 2.79 are supposed to make it into 2.80. But i’m worried this one is getting forgotten about.
Hum, what’s the difference bettween 2.79’s masks and 2.80’s set Holdout ? I thought it was the same…
All these options are not the final UI design but it should be shipped as is in 2.80.
In the original plans all this should have been done through dynamic overrides that would allowed other nice stuff and more generic override per collection (for now we can only override materials) .
But as dynamic overrides weren’t ready for 2.8, devs added these functionalities temporarily without making a strong UI design, because all this should be replaced in the upcoming 2.81 / 2.82 release.
So for now we have to deal with it, but it’s not forgotten, only postponed.
What specifically about renderability can’t you do currently?
You can set a lot of things for the View Layer as a whole, so if you want to change whether a layer gets rendered, alter the number of samples for that render, or specify an overriding material for all objects rendered in that layer (to manually make mask comp layers or whatever), you can do it in the View Layer properties along with lots of other per-view-layer stuff: (click to see the whole image)
Ok, fair enough, all of that can be done. It’s certainly a far cry from the speed/ease with which it could be done in 2.79.
From what i can tell, those settings apply to RenderLayers and they deliver passes to the compositor, I’m talking about applying toggles directly to Collections, and seeing the outcome directly in the Render Result like you were able to do in 2.79.
Isn’t that what Exclude, Holdout (i.e. Mask), as well as Indirect Only let you do at the Collection level now? Yes, we need some outliner visual indications for some of those options, but it should all work today.
Some of it certainly has opportunities for further workflow smoothing.
There’s also the future Dynamic Override system that is planned and will let you override pretty much any parameter at any level, but that will be 2.81+
There have been several Outliner smoothing changes in the last couple days, and there’s at least one other person who is submitting patches for it, and there’s a GSOC selected project for Outliner improvements, so there should be lots of good things coming.
