How to render objects and HDRI map separately

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Last night I destroyed two weeks of renders, and it’s all my fault. It happened after two weeks of rendering the object, meaning the part that takes 5 minutes per frame, for a total of 1400 frames. After nights of torturing my Mac Studio to the brink of death, I destroyed each and every single file when at 5 am, after having taken my sleep medication, I decided to render the HDRI map for all 1400 frames, knowing that would be probably be done in one night.

So I hid the object, unchecked “transparent” in the render settings, then clicked on the Render menu item, then went down to Render Animation, and in that simple act, destroyed two or maybe even three weeks of rendering this project every night. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t doing this as a paid or even unpaid job, and just for myself, or that would’ve been a really hard conversation.

So since obviously I can’t trust my brain to raise a disaster prevention alert, I need to find out how to render the object or objects to two separate folders, and two different file names.

So where can I start?

2

Composite with render layers and a file output node:

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Sorry for your loss.

3

Haha thanks!

4

Bit it seems to me that this might composite both outputs into a file. What I would like is two separate file sequences, one for the main object, the other one for the HDRI world background.

So in the case of the main object, the render needs to have the option enabled for “transparent” in the render settings, then in the sequence for the background, the main object has to be invisible and the world background has to be enabled. The main object is inside its own collection, so that means the collection can be hidden rather than the object itself.

Is this possible?

5

They will be separate files in the same folder, but the file name will have the input name appended.

If you want two separate folders, just use two separate file output nodes.

You can absolutely set up render layers to do what you are looking for, search for some render layer tutorials for more specifics.