I have a character model that I’m trying to render animations for, and ideally I want one render that is just the body without the head, and one render that is just the head without the body (so that I can animate the two independently).
What is the easiest way to hide a set of faces/vertices from appearing in a render? I’ve got the head vertices set up as a separate vertex group, but I can’t see how to exclude them from the render.
The easiest way to hide a set of faces/vertices from appearing in a render is to use the Hide key: The letter ‘h’. Select the faces and vertices that you want hidden and press the ‘h’ key on your keyboard.
The second method is to put the object (set of faces/vertices) on a different layer and have the layer deselected.
dleri, hiding a part of a mesh won’t prevent it from rendering. Also, it’s not possible to put parts of a mesh into different layers, that only works for objects.
andygeers, an easy way to do it would be to duplicate the model and putting it into a different layer. That way you can do whatever you want without affecting the original model.
EDIT: You could also duplicate the head and separate it from the base mesh. Then use the head as a mask in the Node editor.
in blender-2.5x you could use the “Mask” modifier
for the object.
Backdraw is, it only works on vertices (or armatures) and not
on faces. This hides the vertices including all attached faces and you may need to insert an additional loop.
Nice thing using this method, if you only have one vertices-group, you can easy switch between its vertices and the rest of all vertices … the little check-box “use invert”.
To enable or disable the modifier click on the eye/photo-icons in the modifier-box.
So you can make it only active during the rendering (=disable photo).