Now, I do know how to use both, but as I’m writing tutorial which uses Scenes, I’m wanting to make a clear distinction between the two methods.
Essentially, both can be used to move objects / items from in and out of current view. Both can have “linked” items appearing multiple times (that is, Layers can have a single item appearing on multiple layers whereas Scenes can choose to link-as-same-object or complete-new-copy an item). As far as I can tell, Scenes have the advantage over Layers in that different Scenes can be accessed separately in the compositor… Layers can not (correct me please if I am wrong on this). Of course, one “Scene” can contain multiple “Layers” so Scenes are the outermost set (more Global)
So - to properly get my definitions right in my tutorial, I thought I’d ask: What are the real and practical differences between using Scenes versus Layers? It seems to me that many things done in Scenes could simply be done with Layers so aside from the compositor thing, why is it important for us to have both?
Right off the bat, first thing that comes to mind is that scenes allow for a totally different render setting or render engine, while render layers are great for masking but still have the same render settings and engine. I know I don’t know all there is to know but the difference has helped me with compositing internally in Blender with combining elements of both internal and cycles.
Sorry, maybe I messed up, since you said not about the compositor.
Most of the differences come from the fact that Blender doesn’t have generic per-property layer overrides (for example you can’t have an object in one place on one render layer, and a different place on another), or things that are stored in the scene data itself (like render settings and render engine selection). A few notable examples:
-Render engine and render settings are per-scene, so layers all have to share with a few exceptions.
-World is a scene attribute. 2 scenes can use different world block, layers must all share.
-Active camera is also per scene, so multiple scenes can be used to render multiple angles.
Something worth noting, an object in 2 scenes is considered 2 different instances of the object. Deleting an object from one scene does not affect the other scene(s) its in at all. Whereas layers are all the same object, so if you delete the object it is deleted from all layers.