Renderlayers question

I’m running some tests on the Renderlayers composite node options. First I setup a test files with a couple cubes, a light and a plane so that I could put each object in a different scene layer. Blend file is:

http://www.savefile.com/files/1575165

Then, on the RenderLayers tab, I put each scene layer in a renderlayer, and setup up a input node for each renderlayer. That works fine.

My question is how to use multilayers to “save” the renderlayer node results, so that the next day, I can just read them back from the multilayer file, and show them in the viewer again.

The document WIKI and various threads have gotten me to this point, and everything works fine until I save the blend file and re-open it. At that point, all of my Input nodes are again empty, and I have to re-render each renderlayer node to build up the viewer output.

I thought I read that saving the rendered image off the File tab would keep the composite renderlayers in an EXR file until I could use the Read Saved Render results in the Node window, but it’s not working in the Linux version of Blender 2.46 on Fedora 8.

I have some much more complex models and scenes, and I’m hoping this concept can resolve some resource issues I’ve been having and let me build up those scenes nicely.

Any suggestions would be wonderful.

Load the images using a image input not the renderlayer.

I’ll give that a try, that should work as well.

If you re-render any one of the renderlayers (this applies only when you have more than one render layer in any particular scene) via the “re render this layer” button on the lower right hand corner of any render layer node then the other render layers in the composite will be cleared out when the blend file is closed (but not if those render layers are a part of any scene other than the one from which you may be re-rendering) soo…reading layers back in with R key (when hovering mouse cursor over compositor window) works if and only if the entire composite was rendered at once orrrrr…if you make each render layer into a separate scene then go to the scenes individually to re-render those particular layers and finally composite the result in a scene that is empty except for a camera (this scene must also contain an empty render layer). The “Save Buffers” option must also be enabled for each scene too.

I hope that makes sense. It took me six months or so to discover why sometimes the layers would read back flawlessly while other times I only got empty layers. Blender used to require you to save the file B4 the the render buffers were locked on to disk rather than being cleared to nothing upon either closing of the blend file or (as often has been my case) Blender crashes for one reason or another. With v.2.46 there is no clearing of the render buffers unless you use the afore mentioned button on the render layer node or until you over write the saved buffers with a fresh new render. No file saving required (though the “Save Buffers” button is still mandatory.

Good luck.

After Musk gave me his input, I got on the right track RamboBoy. And your comments make sense. With R2.46 on i386 Linux, I’m able to use a FileOutput to render each renderlayer to a png file. Then I can read that png back into the noodle with an Image input node. However, refreshing the Input node after I make a change seems to be a problem. The best I’m able to do at this point is to either delete the Image Node and create a new one with the same file name OR do File->New and then after the default scene comes up, read my main file in again OR just close blender and open it again. The R (reread) key works in those scenarios.
There doesn’t seem to be a refresh option for the Image input node, and even these different scenarios seem to cause hangups and problems after a few cycles (except dropping blender and restarting of course).

I’ll read RamboBoy’s post a few times again, and keep on trying… this is a very complex process. Of course, I could remodel some of my objects and reduce the vertex count to see if that would work (but where’s the fun in THAT). :slight_smile:

I’m not sure why but image nodes won’t refresh even if you go to the trouble of reselecting the image into the node. I always just delete the image node and add a new one back in.