[0:00]All right, so, in today's tutorial, I'm going to be showing you a quick tip that I wish I would have known when I first started learning Blender, that's going to save you a lot of time and frustration in Blender. This tip is actually very important, so if you're new to learning Blender, um, or you just started recently and you don't know this, I do recommend you to stick around and use this method. Because I've seen it before but never cared to use it because I thought I didn't need it till now that I find myself building these large scale animations, um, and uh, it takes a toll on my computer. It takes a toll, it really does take a toll on my computer. And so, believe it or not, Blender does struggle rendering so many things at once. So, what would the solution to that be? Layer views and holdouts.
[0:52]All right, so, in this scene, as you can see, um, I have already my my foreground, my midground, and my background separate into uh, different collections. And to do that, all you would want to do is you would select your foreground, you would click M, uh, and click on new collection, and you're going to name this foreground or whatever you want to call it. Uh, you could have many different collections, but we're using three, uh, so that we don't make this too complicated. And then again, midground, and then you would do the same. I am not going to do this because I already have them separate, but then I'm just trying to show you how you would go about this. You name it, click okay, and it'll move it into a new collection. Um, once you have your three collections, uh, set up, as you can see here, they're all turned on. You can see everything, this would be the final, um, animation, as you can see. Uh, by the way, if you want to have access to these, uh, on on learning how I created all all of this and the whole scene and everything, there is a YouTube video that I've uploaded already, uh, that you can go ahead and click that and uh, it'll take you on a step-by-step tutorial on how I was I built all of this. And if not, you can also go ahead and grab the uh, project file of this on my Patreon on the link on the description down below. But so, going on forward, uh, what we're what we have to do now is pretty much just go ahead now and make three other layers, one for each collection, so to to do that, what you would want to do is you would click on add view layer. And uh, just click on new, and uh, add another one. Again, we have three collections, so we need three of these, as you can see. So, for the first one, let's just say I want to call it uh, on this case, I want to call it foreground. On the second one, let's call it midground or just mid, and then for the background, for the third one, call it background or just back. Uh, and so now we have uh, all of these three layers. Let's go back onto that first first one, which would be the foreground, and uh, you want to click on this filter icon and you want to turn on the hold out, um, masking tool right here. Uh, it'll be on to the right of your collections, as you can see. And so now what we would do is we would select and add a hold out onto the things that we wouldn't we wouldn't want to show on this scene. So, in this case, we want to stay with the foreground, so we would add add the hold out on the other two collections that we have here. And then we would do the same thing for the midground. So, on the midground, we want to keep it, so we we would add the hold out on the first one and the last one, and then the same thing for the background. We would just add the hold out on the first two. So, as you can see, we now have background, midground, and the foreground. So now, basically, if you go ahead, um, another thing that would be good about this is that you could lower your your samples and your rendering time, uh, by a lot. And you're still get good quality because uh, it's actually rendering separate. Uh, so it's going through it, um, but again, you're still getting that good quality. So, what you would do is let's say if you render image, as you can see, it goes and it renders, um, the first the foreground, the first off layer. Then it goes ahead and render the midground, which is the third layer. And then after this, when it goes ahead and render the background, which is the third layer. And so now you might be wondering, well, what would happen if I want to render all of the three, um, and export it, uh, like merge together? So, to do that, what you would want to do is you would go to compositing, click on use notes. Um, and then we have we this a bit to the left. And uh, we need three of these, one for each uh, each collection or each uh, layer. And so now you would change uh, this right here to mid, and the third one, we will change it to back. So, now we have front, mid, and back, as you can see here. So, the let's go ahead really quickly and add an alpha over. And what this is going to do is it's going to allow us uh, join all these three into just one composition. Okay? So, let's go ahead and connect that one there, and uh, we're going to connect this one right here.
[5:18]And then we will take this one and connect it onto the image, and so really quickly, we could also go ahead and add a viewer node, and uh, if we click on here, as you can see, our three different layers are merged together to form just one composition. So now, if you go ahead, and uh, you go and select an output, which I already have one, and you name it. Let's go ahead and delete all of these so you can see that happening. So now, if you go ahead and you start rendering the animation, so you can see, um, our layers are being basically rendered separately, which makes again, your computer a bit less loaded when it when it comes to rendering, because it's rendering everything separate. Um, so it doesn't have to render everything in in just one layer, uh, so believe it or not, it helps it. But as you can see, we have to do no extra steps, um, as far as to having go uh, to taking all these images and now compiling them into one, into one, because we could just do that automatic automatically with Blender. So, as you can see, our animation is pretty much being built up as one, while it being rendered as multiple layers. So, I think that is lovely. This could help you save a lot of time, I'm telling you. This is helping me build these large scale environment scenes that I like to do with the water, the particle systems, the simulations, the clouds, the volumetrics, and all this stuff being rendered into separate layers without my computer crashing, which was a big issue for me before. It was literally crashing literally after like every other like five frames, and it was pretty stressful. So now, I don't have to deal with this no more, um, and this does the magic. So, that being said, if you did enjoy the video, please make sure to drop a like down below, comment what you want to see next, subscribe if you're new to the channel, and again, don't forget if you want to grab uh, grab the uh, project file, it'll be on my Patreon down below. Um, I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.
