Blender Render Management

[Fabian]

Hi,
I'm wondering if anyone who has jumped to Blender can recommend an addon that brings a functionality somewhat similar to render passes? I saw there were a whole bunch available on the market place. From what I can see in-built render management is somewhat basic?

Thank you,
Fabian

[kowy]

try octane for blender

[kiwimation]

Blenders render pass system isn't as good compared to Softimage's but it is still quite useful. The workflow for setting them up is a bit painful.

You can separate out parts of your nodes trees into AVOs etc like you could with SI. etc

If you don't already know how, you may want to search up how to use collections, render layers and blenders compositor to create the render passes you need.

[Fabian]

Thank you. I've had a look at collections and they seem look at doing basically partitions without more than very basic overrides (ray visibility/etc.), what I'm a bit unsure about is doing things like having an animation and some high res stills configured in the same file. Or a bunch of stills with different cameras and lighting setups. In xsi it's never been a problem for example in an archviz job to have the day/night/interior/anim in all the same scene file and sort it all out via passes with different lighting/environments/camera/render settings/scene pruning without any issues. Things like wildcards in the file paths and such. Same in Houdini albeit a slightly different approach.

[kiwimation]

You should be able separate the different light set ups with collections, day, night etc. But it may get a bit painful to manage.

You can also look at having different scenes within the one scene file, In the top right next to the render layers drop down there is one that says Scene, you can add
linked, scenes, copies etc. Not sure if that would work for you. I tried it and found it to be a bit unreliable.

There may be some addons that might help you, you will have to look around, But at the end of the day, the render pass system in Blender just isn't as good as Softimage's.