2
$\begingroup$

A File Output node like this ...

enter image description here

... will generate several images at once (here: A001.png, ..., A250.png and B001.png, ..., B250.png and C001.png, ..., C250.png, all in folder D). For reasons involving different render border settings, I would like to sometimes only render A and B, say, sometimes B and C, sometimes only A, and so on.

Q: Is there a way to "elegantly" switch off generation of individual outputs (I think they are called subpaths)? The only way I have found so far is to disconnect the individual inputs. In order to facilitate disconnecting and reconnecting, I already added reroute nodes nearby. More "elegant" would be a checkbox or the like (perhaps even animate-able)

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ You can't disable/mute sockets as far as I'm aware. $\endgroup$
    – Robert Gützkow
    Commented Jul 30, 2019 at 20:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1
$\begingroup$

If you output to multiple png files, there is no downside to having separate File Output node for each instead of the one with many inputs. You can then select the ones you want to temporarily disable and press m for mute. If you had multilayer EXR that would be a problem, but since you only need to output separate PNGs, that should work fine. Disconnecting inputs also seems elegant enough for me.

You can also use this new node Switch (Blender 2.80) that you can find in Add -> Layout -> Switch

enter image description here

It gives you a checkbox and you can hit ctrl+h to hide unused inputs when you have it selected as you can see I have done on the first one for it to be more compact. It seems to be animate-able, but I have not tested it.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ Oh, I saw th eSwitch node, but thought it could not really switch off (i.e., switch to constant white or other colour at best). In other words, I learned about input hiding only now, thanks :) $\endgroup$
    – Hagen von Eitzen
    Commented Jul 31, 2019 at 17:46

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .