I was wondering if anyone had any video tutorials that go into in-depth details about the functionality of render layers, how they can be used in post-processing and how to utilize them in after effects.
I know this is a winded request, but I would love to learn the many benefits and best practices for render layers.
i am sorry to say that, but youtube and vimeo are your best friends
Well, it’s safe to say that the major benefits, if not all the benefits of this approach, are for the compositing phase, so the focus it’s on the compositor and post-processing techniques.
Now since photoshop or GIMP we know that shifting your work in layers it’s handy and makes you a smarter artist because you can divide your scene in smaller bits and add more artistic value when recomposing it or just add a step in between the merging phase for 2 or more layers, a simple example is the “Burn” or “Multiply” blending mode, or all the blending mode in general.
The same it’s true for the 3D world, it’s not mandatory to use more than 1 render layer, but it’s often a good thing, especially when you don’t have a really simple scene like a product “still life” and you have a much more populated scene.
This topic is wide but in Blender you can group things in the compositing phase according to:
and you can also use mask layers.
This gives you a lot of power if you want to split your scene, organize your workflow, organize your render for exporting it, and in general it’s good to know because it’s really something that can speed up your pipeline.
Splitting things apart only to recombine them again in After Effects can be a hassle. Especially if you have objects moving from the background to the foreground in z-space. Then you have to stack and mask in After Effects. The most useful thing to export out of Blender is the z-pass. Then you can use that with a compound blur effect, in After Effects, for a better DOF blur. Otherwise layer use is dependent upon the type of scene you are solving for.
Here is a simple z-pass setup.
I friggin love you guys. Thank you very much for the “starter push” on this.
The word “layer” is seriously-ambiguous in Blender parlance. It means a lot of different totally-unrelated things.
Where RenderLayers really shine is when you use the MultiLayer OpenEXR file format. All of the RenderLayers that you’ve named will be in there, with all the channels of information that you asked for, all of it self-describing and in high numeric precision.
And how do you use RenderLayers? They’re separate, named, sets of information that you can combine in any way that you can come up with a node-network (a “noodle”) to do. The digital computer is really acting like a computer at this point, and you’re really programming it, visually.
Your project workflow becomes that you make multiple renders, capturing all the data in this way, and then you combine it all together with compositing to make the final image a piece at a time.
