Is there a way to set the layers you want to render independently from the layers you are viewing in the 3D window? I often use objects that I want to be able to see in the 3D viewport but don’t want to render, for example I use black balls parented to the eyes to hold the place of the irises which can be very hard to see in the 3D viewport, in order to get my eye movement right. Or I temporarily disappear things that I want to render, in order to work around them. Obviously, it’s simple to turn the layers off or on each time I have to render, but it would be nice if I could just set a certain set of layers to render all the time, regardless of what I did while I was working on the scene. It would save a lot of half-started renders, especially when you’ve got several different layers which you want to monkey around with during editing, but always want the same during rendering.
If there’s a way to do this presently let me know.
i do not know if this is the most efficient method, but i use the context awareness of blender to my advantage.
i keep one window open with the active camera view, and i keep it locked, only showing the layers i want to render. i work in another, unlocked window, which shows my active construction layers. i turn these on or off to display only what i am working with at the moment, to speed up interaction, usually turning off any complex or obstructive geometry. when i am ready to render, i simply move the cursor over the active ( locked ) camera window, and hit f12, which renders from that window setup.
i hope someone else can offer a more precise method, but this works for me…
Thanks, that’s a good idea. That certainly seems like it will do the trick. The only slight problem for me might be screen real estate, since I do a lot of my work on a very small laptop. (I live in Japan and bought the laptop here, so believe me when I say it’s small.) But I suppose I could just make that viewport tiny…
I suspect that the options in the Render Layers tab of current CVS versions
Sounds like it might indeed… I was actually wondering whether it would be a good feature request, but I figured I wasn’t the first person to think of wanting something like this. It’d be cool if it’s in the next release.