Please note: I don’t mean AOVs or render layers.
I am trying to do a project in Blender because it’s for a libre open-source hardware project, where it’s necessary to have the CG files also done in free software because we want to bundle them with the rest.
I’d like to set up the project like I would do it with Cinema 4D’s take system or Maya’s render setup. (Searching for it didn’t show any results (apart from AOV stuff), that’s why I’m asking here.)
Welcome 
…
because not everyone using blender also knows about all the features of other software ( or blender itself )… it would be helpfull to maybe give any links to docu or mini-tutorials about this ?? So an experience blender user maybe can tell you: there is some slighty different in blender …or just: no.
Except you expect only ansers from C4D or Maya users also using blender and being here 
… that are a lot of conditions to be meet…
Kind of. You can use Scenes and View layers in combination with the Compositor to go into that direction.
That is going to be much easier with The Other Realms Shot Manager
I was a C4D user for over 15 years myself and I can tell you: Get rid of C4D habits. 
It’s not about getting rid of “C4D habits”. I’m not even sure why that is worded that way. It’s about trying to translate useful functionality from one software to another. All modern DCCs have a render system. C4D has a Takes system. Houdini has a takes system. Maya has a Render Setup. They’re all useful for isolating elements, isolating elements within particular AOVs, assigning specific shaders during render time, light linking/grouping, AOV assignment, and much more functionality.
I googled and screenshot tutorials for you so you can see what we are talking about.
Shot Manager ($40) appears to fix this quality of life issue.
Sadly not. This is one of the things that really prevents my use of Blender.
The Takes system referred to enables full object transform variations, not just ‘shot / render’ variations. Eg: Let’s say you were setting up some car shots. In the C4D Takes system you could have as many variations of objects and object transforms, as well as material, camera, lighting set ups as you want - all stored in the same file.
Eg:
Take 1: Drivers door open, wheels straight, lighting set up one, camera set up one.
Take 2: Drivers door closed, front wheels turned to the left, lighting set up two, camera set up two.
etc. etc.
As far as I understand Shot manager doesn’t allow for this level of ‘any parameter’ variation, eg: object transforms.
If this can be done, I’d love to know about it!
Ahh… i maybe got it now… (somehow totally overseeing @pixelmonk’s post 
and) after (finaly) seeing this about the C4D's take system…
…and as it was said there … scratching just the surface… well… not natively in one tool i think… but:
Maybe you mean something more like this ??:
That looks very interesting - thanks for the heads up!
It’s also every time very interesting to learn how other apps do things or have some ideas how to do things… Sometimes someone can even understand the favorite tool of choice better because of this… 
Kind of a necro thread here but I too am recently coming from C4D and would love for a similar Takes functionality in Blender. Looks like the Designer Tools Variant Lister Pro link above hasn’t been upgraded to work with version 4.0+. Is anyone aware of another add on or new 4.0+ functionality that does it natively?
There isn’t really much in the C4D video that Okidoki posted that can not be done with Blenders scene system.
It works a bit differently but in the end it is pretty much the same. You get different versions of your stuff with different camera angles, lighting or animations and can render everything with one button press.
One thing that has been a bit annoying in Blender is that materials are not yet overridable. This makes the setup a bit more complicated but it is not that inconvenient either.
Problem is that most people seem to only have a very superficially understanding of scenes and collections and conclude that you can’t do this sort of thing.
Some of the functions you want can be obtained by using the Photographer Addon for Blender…
This is an older video as Photographer is now version 5.4…
But take a look, I highly recommend it…
I’m looking to override animation for a scene where my object consists of several objects each with their own actions. Ideally, I’d love to make a new iteration with a completely different animation for that same object heirarchy. As I understand it, the scene system offers 3 options of which Full copy is the only one that lets me start to iterate on the animation. However, this duplicates all the geo & increases the file size unnecessarily for each full copy whereas C4D’s Takes system uses the same geo & simply overrides any changed value on your given properties. Is Full Copy the only way to go here?
@watercycles Thanks for the link. Easy States looks like it doesn’t handle overrides for animations (or at least not showcased). It’s unclear if you can setup a swap for an action.
This is going to be long post because of the explanation but it is really just a couple of clicks:
You could make a linked copy.
Now you have two scenes with the exact same collections.
This means that you can change something inside a collection in one scene and it will be changed inside the corresponding collection in the other scene as well.
You might want that for your lighting collection, your camera collection and your background collection but not for your collection which contains your animated objects.
For your animated object collection you want to
rightclick in outliner → duplilcate linked
You now have a new collection which contains all your animated objects. These are individual objects but all their data is shared with the original collection.
The mesh, the animation, the material and so on. This means that your file is pretty much identical and has not grown in size.
Now you want to get rid of the of the original collection.
rightclick in outliner → Unlink
Now you have two identical scenes. The only difference are the objects in your animated objects collection.
Now you go to
dope sheet → Action editor
Select the object which you want to animate differently and unlink the action it has.
Then create a new action and animate it.
The result is:
Two scenes that share everything except for the animation data of your objects.
You can also “override” the meshes of specific objects.
You can change the material but you before changing the material you have to go to the material tab and change the material from being linked to the object instead of the data.
If you want more control, performance and/or flexibility you can allways incorporate linked files, custom properties, NLA editor, geo node setups and python scripting. But for the stuff that the guy does in the video you don’t need any of that. It is really just 5 clicks or so.
@watercycles I looked at the docs and apparently its just a toggle between rendering a single frame & rendering an animation. No indication that you can override an object’s action from one to another. I’ve reached out to the creator to see if their Custom Modifier supports it as it’s not explicitly stated in the docs.
edit: just heard back and no, it’s not currently possible to override actions although it is in the works for a future release.
Thanks so much for the thorough detail and helping me to understand what’s happening under the hood!
This feature sounds nice, but I can’t see why one would prefer it over doing these material variations in post. If it’s animation, I have found some success in using different scenes with the same model by using child of modifiers on empties assigned to those scenes.
Hi demafleez. I sure remember you from my decade plus long run with c4d. I still use c4d r20, but have really come to love Blender. Nice to see you here!
