BLENDER TUTORIAL - View Layers and Z-Combine in Blender 4.1 | Compositing Basics

Text version of a videotutorial published on my Youtube channel (scheduled to be published on May 13th, 2024).

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Hello everyone!

In this short basic tutorial, we'll cover two different topics with a single practical example: how to position objects on two or more different View Layers in a Blender 4.1 scene, and how to blend them in Compositing using the Z-Combine node, in order to obtain, in the final rendering, from each View Layer, the pixels that are closest to the virtual camera.

View Layers allow us to render objects separately in a scene.

It's also possible to choose which View Layers to render and which not to.

This also allows us to optimize resources and rendering times, especially in very large or element-rich scenes.

The Z-Combine node allows us to sort objects from two or more View Layers, or even from different images with a Z channel or distance map, in order to obtain a single rendering in which the elements are displayed based on their distance from the virtual camera.