Three Layer Rendering

Three Layer Rendering - Blender Add-on

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

Support for Blender 4 +

• Splits geometry into 3 different layers (Background, Foreground and Focus).
• Option to create a Composition node mixing all layers and its passes, saving a lot of tedious time.
• 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.

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.

Links:

Video tutorial

Doumentation

CHANGELOG:

1.0.0

• Initial release.

1.0.1

• Fixed: Blender crashes randomly when opening Blend files that have TLR enabled.
• Minor fixes.
• Added "recursive collections" to View Layer from Collection option. Now all collections inside selected one will be created too.
• Added option to remove selected View Layer in list.
• Added Expand/Collapse properties to Collections list.

1.0.2

• Added Camera Culling option (Initial state).
• Added Culling Start and End Area Width options.
• Added Culling Area Location options.
• Added Culling Area Scale options.
• Added Culling Mask Z Location (in case of glitches just set this to a higher value).

1.0.3

• Fixed Camera Culling first state. Camera Culling is now disabled by default.

1.0.4

• Fixed minor bugs.
• Added Change View Layers order option. While changing them, every other settings will be hided.
• Added icon to Collections List.
• Added automation to Smart Geometry Nodes option. Now it will be disabled if it detects any object without Instances On Points node in the root. 

1.0.5

• Fixed Culling Mask object repeated for each selected object.
• Fixed new collection sometimes excluded when creating "New View Layer from Collection".

1.1.0

• Fixed Camera Culling mask location.
• Camera Culling now affects meshes.
• Added option to enable/disable Culling in Meshes.
• Added option to enable/disable Culling in Geometry Nodes.
• Added option to Clean Unused Data.
• Split Options Panel enhanced.

1.2.0

• Added Cryptomatte passes.
• Added Shader AOVs passes.
• Added Light Groups passes.
• Added Debug and Alpha Threshold to passes.
• Added Filter options to passes.
• Added Override options to passes.
• Added "Expand All Collections" and "Collapse All Collections" to Collections List.
• Added Debug Mode to add-on preferences (in case of bug, enable Debug Mode and start Blender from Console).
• Changed some Interface elements.
• Fixed minor bugs.

V1.3.0

• Added Blender 4.2 compatibility.
• Added compatibility with new Blender Extensions feature. You can install it (local way) into both Extensions or Add-ons.
• Added new 'World Override' feature to Override Options.
• Added "Use only View Layers" feature. Now Split Objects and View Layers features are completely separated from each other. So there is no need to split anything to use View Layers interface.
• Added "Create Composition node" feature. Automatically create a node group with all layers already mixed, allowing to spend your time efficiently. (ex: if it contains all 3 Diffuse passes, it mixes them. If same with Glossy, it mix Diffuse and Glossy, and so on...)
• Changed some Interface elements.
• Fixed bug where selected View Layer changes to first one when collapsing/expanding collections.
• Fixed minor bugs.

V1.4.0

• Added Camera Culling feature to View Layers. In v1.3.0 it was available only with Split Objects.
• "Create Composition node" creates groups for each mixed pass, instead of having a bunch of Mix nodes.
• "Create Composition node" creates a group with all mix nodes, so cleaner.
• "Create Composition node" creates a group with Ambient Occlusion nodes, so even more clean.
• "Create Composition node" creates a group with Denoising nodes.
• Changed Split Settings panel to only show up if selected object has no Geometry Nodes. Because it only affects that kind of objects. 
• Fixed bug where objects with Geometry Nodes doesn't show at all if there were not processed with "Smart Geometry Nodes" option enabled. 
• Fixed Environment pass location order in "Create Composition node". Now it is the first one.
• Fixed Denoising node location order in "Create Composition node". Now it is the last one.

V1.5.0

• "Split Objects" recoded from scratch.
• Code optimized. "Split Objects" process 5-8% faster.
• Now TLR detects object's type. So it doesn't matter if selected collection contains meshes, curves, Geometry Nodes "Instance on points" nodes, cameras, etc.. It will process each object with it's own method. This means there is no need to have your objects organized by type (which I do not recommend, organization is key!).
• Added options to set to new View Layer as Indirect Only and Holdout (Shadow Catcher on next release).
• Added automatic EXR Layers detection to "Create Composition Node". Before, it was conditioned by project settings. Now it relies only in EXR image file.
• Added "Open EXR file" option to "Create Composition Node". Before, it checked Blender's output file, now it doesn't matter if your project has 2 layers and the EXR file has 10. It will process EXR layers only.
• Added "Open EXR file" automatic sequence Start/End frames detection.
• Added "Open EXR file" Layers List to change its Layers order before "Create Composition Node".
• Added "Remove EXR file" to reset the values.
• Added "Create Light Correction node" option.
• Added "Create Vignette node" option.
• Added "Create Glare node" option.
• Added confirmation popup to operators.
• "Create Composition Node" now has its own panel.
• Fixed "Split Settings" panel being visible if selected object is not inside TLR collection. Because that setting only affects processed mesh objects.
• Fixed "Create Composition Node" bug where if the layer in the project doesn't exists in rendered image now it shows an error.
• Changed "Split Objects" button to recognize objects type inside selected collection.
• Removed "Remove View Layer" option if it was created with TLR. Do not remove them manually!!, otherwise TLR will not work as expected.
• Changed preferences addons variable to match Extensions Guidelines.
• Changed objects references to match Extensions Guidelines.

RELEASE NOTE:

Reading EXR files layers, supposedly, it may be simple (in Image nodes we find "Layer", with a list of them), but I've not found any reference (No matter where I search for that list). So in order to have the ability to auto compose any EXR file, I must force an error in the image node "Layer" option. Once the error pops up (ironically with the list I'm looking for) I can get that error Info to extract the mentioned list.

It is explained in the popup when you press "Find Image Layers" button. An error shows up, just press "Prepare Image Layers" button and you're good to go.

V1.5.1

• Fixed "Vignette node" initial temperature color. Just a little darker. 
• "Composition Node" from EXR files had been rewrited from scratch. There is no need to force an error anymore and now it works in Windows properly. Still not founded a "normal" way to get Layers from EXR files...
• Now when Composition node is created, current frame is sequence start frame.

v1.5.2

• Fixed "Composition Node" bug where TLR fails if not EXR file selected. 

"Composition Node" NOTE:

There are 2 ways to use this option:

1. Render first image of your scene, and TLR will detect it and show up "Create Composition node" button.

2. Or (in any project, even a new one) press "Just use View Layers" button, and select first EXR sequence image in "Composition Node" panel. Then press "Find image layers" button, and TLR will show up selected image layers list. Change the order if you want, and press "Create Composition node" button.