Always render the visible objects

Question

I am using Blender for some scientific-related visualization. As such I guess my needs are much more modest than those of the average animator, and the decoupling of the visibility and renderability of objects (i.e., the fact I can set some object to rendered although it is not visible in preview) only causes problems for me, when I change what is visible but forget to also set it to be rendered, only to come back 15 minutes later and see that I had rendered the wrong scene. Is there some way to "couple" visibility and renderability, i.e. only whatever is set as visible is also set as renderable?

Answer 1

You could also do this with Python!

To do so you could run the following code, manually, before rendering:

import bpy

for obj in bpy.data.objects:
    obj.hide_render = obj.hide

A better solution would be to somehow run the code automagically before rendering, which can be done as follows:

import bpy

def unhide(self):
     for obj in bpy.data.objects:
          obj.hide_render = obj.hide

bpy.app.handlers.render_pre.append(unhide)

To make the script run every time you open up the blend file, name your text block with a .py extension and check Register.

Note that you must run the script once;

Answer 2

Here is a simple process to do before rendering:

1. Deselect all your object A
2. Hit Alt-H to unhide all the objects
3. Without changing the selection, hit Ctrl-H, your objects will be hidden
4. Hit H to hide them again.

Answer 3

For better scene organization I suggest you to use the new layer management addon. With this you can simply disable a layer if you don't want to render it.