Three Layer Rendering (Blender add-on)

Updated add-on: Three Layer Rendering

BlenderMarket: Three Layer Rendering
Gumroad: Three Layer Rendering
Documentation
Videotutorial
Mini videotutorial - Change View Layers order

Fast and low-resources interface to manage View Layers render settings. No need to switch between View Layers, and all related settings unified.

Automatically create Composition Node with all passes mixed, saving you a lot of tedious time.

Automatically splits geometry into three different view layers (Background, Foreground and Focus), giving the ability to do professional renderings in just a few seconds by pressing 2 buttons. It works by measuring distance between the camera and the selected focus object, so it doesn’t matter if the focus object has animation. And it works with timeline camera markers.

TLR splits meshes, surfaces, meta-balls and texts. For objects with Geometry Nodes, there is Smart Geo Nodes option, which will try to find the “first” Instances On Points node, and connect a group to its Selection input socket. I’ve not found a way to know which Instance On Points node is the correct if it is not in the root of GN modifier, so if that node is anywhere else (a group inside the node tree) this method will not work. It is better for performance to not create some instances, instead of deleting them later.

Features

  • Splits geometry into 3 different layers (Background, Foreground and Focus).

  • Creates View Layers for each one automatically.

  • Custom camera, or active camera (with timeline markers).

  • Option Smart Geo Nodes, for objects with geometry nodes and Instances On Points nodes in root of the node tree (It will save a lot of resources and improve performance, if that’s the case).

  • Option to change the mask domain (Point, Edge, Face, Spline and Instance) for objects with GN and without Instances On Points in the root.

  • Option to change Foreground width.

  • Option to change Focus object location, rotation and scale. (Use this settings, do not try to move TLR Focus object manually!)

  • Option to change Masks Z location (which depending on the total height of your scene can be useful).

  • Option to create a new View Layer for selected objects or active collection with just one click (recursive collections included).

  • Interface to switch between View Layers options directly, without actually change the active View Layer (which is time and resource saving, depending on the project).

  • Option to exclude View Layers directly.

  • Option to set Active View Layer.

  • Option to remove View Layers.

  • Option to change View Layer passes directly.

  • Change Exclude, Hide In Viewport, Holdout and Only Indirect of any collection directly.

  • Option to show only TLR View Layers.

  • Option to show only TLR collections.

  • Camera Culling option (Initial state).

  • Culling Start and End Area Width options.

  • Culling Area Location options.

  • Culling Area Scale options.

  • Culling Mask Z Location (in case of glitches just set this to a higher value).

  • Option to change View Layers order. While changing them, every other settings will be hided.

Support for Blender 4 +

Why I created TLR?

It had been a long time since I asked myself: How the hell professional studios render the scenes? Of course it’s all about layers. The more splited the objects, the more control you will have. Even knowing how to render different objects in layers with Blender, It was very hard to do it and get a decent composition. What I learned is that to make it work properly, we must render almost each object on the scene in different layers.

Well, it is not true. We can tweak some stuff, to get something similar to that professional renders, so I decided to create TLR.

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