I don’t understand the reaoning of the operation of the Scene Layer Buttons under the Render Layers Panel.
At the moment they seem to be just a duplicate of the Scene layer buttons in the 3d header.
When you have more than one render layer, and switch layers, the “Layer:” buttons (which would be better named “Render” or something other than “Layer”), DO change to whatever they were previously set (as expected). But the Scene Layer buttons are unaffected.
It would make more sense if the Scene Layer settings were also connected to the Render Layer (or possibly optionally connected, though for me, I would always leave that option on if it existed).
As it stands now, you have to manually change the scene buttons to correspond to the “Layer” buttons … (having the Scene Layer buttons and “Layer” buttons match up seems to me to be the most logical way of setting up a scene.
yes. correct. By default, the Layers are the currently selected layers, and they logical AND each other, which is why by default all RenderLayer buttons are enabled, so that the 3D Layers all show. I think they are there to remind you which layers are selected, so that when you render and get only a partial render, or total blackness, it kinda like hits you “oh, you idiot” thang. It also gives you flexibilty to go back to your 3D view, select only one layer, work on the objects there, and re-render and not have to remember ok, so like which layers for that RenderLayer did I want to have enabled…it automatically renders the scene as you had it laid out.
They are set up that way specifically for 2 purposes: shadows and reflections. Shadows and reflections are rendered in a pre-process, independent of scene geometry. That’s why you always see the render window telling you that it’s creating shadow buffers B4 it does anything else in the scene. What this means to you: If you have geometry on a layer that is set to visible in the “Scene” section of the renderlayers tab, but NOT set to visible in the “Layer” section of the tab, then that geometry will cast it’s shadows correctly into the scene and also reflect off of any mirror objects but it will NOT actually be rendered. Kind of like Peter Pan’s shadow wondering around without him. It allows you more freedom and creative controll over your scene.
You can find this info here, next to the picture of Cornelius: