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I have a scene with interior room design and I created several light setups for it (daylight from windows, powerful electric light from the ceiling, moody evening light from floor lamps). What would be the best workflow to work with that and be able to batch render them?

For now I have each group of lights in different layers. I can then select which layers I want and start rendering. However this doesn't allow me to batch render several setups at once, because there is no command-line to switch layers on/off.

I read about scenes and wondered if making several scenes which would have same objects, but different lights would do. Batch rendering is possible. But I'm afraid that working further on the design, adding new objects etc. will be tricky, as I will have to somehow synchronize all objects between these scenes.

How is this normally achieved?

I need still images only, no animations.

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2 Answers 2

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Instead of layers use scenes

In this example I want to have two scenes with the light on different places, so I created a new scene by pressing the + button for scene on the info window

then moved the light to the other side and rotated it.

enter image description here

You can choose to link your objects or do a full copy, is up to you and how you want to use your resources. If you link your objects then changes made in one scene will affect objects on others)

Then in the compositor I can have each scene as a render layer and switch between the two of them at will.

enter image description here

If you want to save each scene to a different file on the same render operation then just add file output nodes to each of the scenes.

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks, this helped me a lot. I have never used compositor before, but I managed to get everything done. For now I didn't use Scenes, I just created multiple Render Layers and used node editor so it automatically renders daylight and night images and also mixes of both all in one operation and saved to disk - very useful. $\endgroup$
    – Arek
    Jul 8, 2017 at 22:15
  • $\begingroup$ I'd rather use "Link Objects" than "Full Copy" so nothing is screwed up when I make changes later to the models themselves. $\endgroup$
    – Ahmed Ali
    Jun 4, 2018 at 12:59
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UPD: if you aren't familiar with scripts, I can provide non-script way.

For example, I have 2 light setups on 2 layers:

enter image description here

Now I'm going to animate visibility of lights, I will have first light setup visible on frame 1, second — on frame 2.

I'm setting 1 frame, and in outliner setting invisible and unrenderable objects from all light setups except first. In my case it is lamp:

enter image description here

Next I'm adding keyframes for visibility and rendering for all lights in all light setups including first. To add a keyframe you must move cursor on icon and press I, icon will be highlighted:

enter image description here

Next i'm going to frame 2 and doing same procedure for second light setup.

enter image description here

Setting end frame in render properties and enabling all scene layers

enter image description here

In the end I'm checking light visibility by moving from frame to frame. Now I can render object in 2 light setups by rendering animation with 2 frames.

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  • $\begingroup$ I ended up using Render Layers, however I will try to use this method (animation) to render multiple images from multiple cameras, which I also need to do. It looks like this will work for it. Thanks for help. $\endgroup$
    – Arek
    Jul 8, 2017 at 22:18

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