EVERYTHING to know about RENDER LAYERS in Unreal Engine 5

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Күн бұрын

Compositing with multiple layer EXRs can a be really powerful way of leveling up your images. Unreal Engine 5 supports both alpha channel support but also Render, Stencil and zDepth layers. You can also use the Motion Vector layer to recreate the motion blur in your compositor of choice.
Not only that but by activating the additional render passes in the project settings window, you can also render reflection passes, as well as the unlit, detailed lighting and more.
In this video I'll go over how to add meshes or level actors to layer, how to reassign or remove them. Then how you render these layers out using the movie render queue and sequencer. I'll also show some tips and tricks, caveats with Nanite meshes and how combine the layers in a VFX compositor, such as the free open source Natron.
💡 00:00 Intro to video
💡 00:14 tiedtke.
💡 00:20 Setting up a layer system
💡 03:14 Rendering
💡 04:55 zDepth and Motion Vector layers
💡 06:47 Adding Stencil layers
💡 09:15 Troubleshooting empty render layers
💡 11:14 Combining layers in post
💡 13:00 Outro
Thanks for watching, if you like the video feel free to like and subscribe for more tutorials on #unrealengine5 #vfx and #compositing
Follow my journey to become a VFX Artist, Digital Compositor and Lighting 3D artist working in the industry.
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I've worked 9+ years as a Director of Photography in Sweden, working on projects ranging from feature films to commercials and music videos. Currently studying at Visual Magic in Skellefteå, Sweden. Years active in the 3D industry is about 2 years. Focusing on visual effects, 3D animation and lighting which is my passion.
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Пікірлер: 108

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

As always, let me know if you've got any question here in the comments! I'll try to reply as quickly as possible. Thanks! 🤗

@elmoron7396 Жыл бұрын

Translucent materials will appear on every layer，how to fix it？

@matrixvfx3299 Жыл бұрын

I NEED TO RENDER CASTE SHADOW ONLY IN UNREAL ENGINE

@JoshLange3D 8 ай бұрын

Is there a way to make an actor a holdout, e.g. ball in a hand?

@chriswong225 Ай бұрын

is that a way to separate the heterogeneous volume (VDB) layer? it sims cannot be sepparate.

@andrewwelch5017 8 ай бұрын

If you have ANY Nanite meshes in your scene (not just in the layers your rendering), this won't work. If you do have Nanite objects, disable Nanite by entering the console command "r.Nanite 0" and your layers will render as expected. Once you have rendered your layers, you can enable Nanite again by entering "r.Nanite 1". Hope that helps!

@tiedtkeio 8 ай бұрын

Amazing tip! Thank you Andrew!!

@VirtualSteven 4 ай бұрын

Your a legend thank you. I have been troubleshooting why my layers were not rendering properly and this was the fix. 😊

@Purple_Chris 3 ай бұрын

It does seem to render the Nanite Fall Back mesh this way which has lower quality.

@axelwilde1081 10 күн бұрын

OMG!!! I have been searching FOREVER to find a solution to my rendering problem and this solved everything. How I just chanced on this video as a last ditch attempt...and wallah! Thank you so, so much for the tip.

@littlecurrybread Жыл бұрын

Exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Excellent! Thanks for watching! 🤗

@simonflash_edit Жыл бұрын

Thanks for this helpful video. It's also great that you mentioned that there's a problem with using nanite meshes, as this saved me alot of time and headaches :)

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

No worries, thanks for watching Simon! Haha yeah, I spent so many hours trying to figure out why some meshes didn't render when others did. Until I figured out it was Nanite hahah..

@isermanlab Жыл бұрын

Very cool! Learned so much!

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Super Stephan! More information and tutorials regarding this topic is coming! Thanks for watching! 🙂🙏

@andreybagrichuk5365 Жыл бұрын

Thank U a lot for amazing material man !!!

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

And thank you for watching Andrey! 😊

@magnusnilsson8427 Жыл бұрын

Awesome! Thank you!!

@Sknueppel85 8 ай бұрын

Thank you so Much! Great Video

@tiedtkeio 8 ай бұрын

Thank you Sebastian for watching! ☺️

@marklavania3680 9 ай бұрын

Quite insightful. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Subscribing!

@tiedtkeio 9 ай бұрын

Thanks! Glad you liked it! :)

@paulfedor9828 Жыл бұрын

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

@DrBombayOfficial Жыл бұрын

I love it!

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Thank you!!

@kokokrunch9188 9 ай бұрын

thnks dwight 😀

@paulfedor9828 Жыл бұрын

Thank you so much for answerig questions. Been testing UE for VFX procduction shots....and have a forest scene...and couldnt get stencil passes to work. Have you encountered any bugs with Stencil passes...?

@mumpay Жыл бұрын

great video! haven't seen anyone go over this yet! So far the feature seems super janky though.... metahuman hair doesn't seem to be coming in with the body layers, do you know any workarounds for that? And motion blur seems to cause total mayhem with edges. And unreal's zdepth is such low quality, when it works at all... Would love a more indepth tutorial like this but with more motion (aka moving cam plus moving object on a static set, split out sky, background and object and re-composite). Thank you for the great tut!

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Thank you! Yes, it's definitely a BETA feature, hopefully they'll include more AOV passes in the near future. Haven't tried hair, will have a look! Motion blur should work just fine as that's one of the main features of the stencil layers though, so that's odd. I will make more tutorials on this subject, great suggestions for content! Thanks!

@matrixvfx3299 Жыл бұрын

Great Tutorial, Can we render shadow pass separately? Only caste shadow...

@niclasfangorn Жыл бұрын

Great tutorial! I have a question regarding "Linear color space only" vs "Allow through tonemapper". Should I always use linear if I want to do color adjustments in post or what's the reason? In other tutorials on the topic of enable alpha channel support they use "Allow through tonemapper" but never comments on why.

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Thank you Niclas!! You can also use "Allow through tonemapper", it doesn't really matter as it's almost the same option. Here's what the official Unreal Engine documentation says: Disabled - Disabled, reducing GPU cost to the minimum. (default). LinearColorSpaceOnly - Maintain alpha channel only within linear color space. Tonemapper won't output alpha channel. AllowThroughTonemapper - Maintain alpha channel within linear color space, but also pass it through the tonemapper. The way I understand it is that Linear Only will render faster than the Tonemapper option, however it's probably an extremely minimal difference in time/performance. 🙂

@niclasfangorn Жыл бұрын

@@tiedtkeio Great - thanks! I'll stick to linear for now. Just swapped from tonemapper to linear so don't want to sit through another session of shaders compiling. :) Keep up the good work, you just got yourself a new subscriber.

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

@@niclasfangorn Thank you! More videos are coming shortly! 🙂

@mae2309 Жыл бұрын

Holy. Shitzzle. This was s very good topic.. I will try this on my next project. Thank you

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Haha thank you Mae for watching! I agree, you can make your renders look sooo much better by using the render layers and then color grade or do composites on each layer afterwards. 🙂🙏

@mrhmakes Жыл бұрын

Thank you! very informative! But do you by chance have something similar but with post done in davinci resolve? Am curious as to how that might breakdown

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Thank you! I don't have at the moment, but it's on my to-do list haha. I usually comp in Fusion. Will try to get it done and then tag you! 😊

@E.H.N Жыл бұрын

Could this be used to prevent Player hands or gun from meshing through objects? By rendering them separately?

@felixmagnusson Жыл бұрын

Have you managed to get stencil layers to work in UE 5.1? I've been trying every way I can think of but it just wont output any alpha...

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

I'm discussing how you activate the alpha channel at kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Y56FedyS1sjNd3U.html, have you followed those steps? And have you either assigned the background i.e. the skydome, height fog, skylight and directional light to a separate layer or just deleted them alltogether? Everything works just fine for me, both in 5.1 and 5.1.1, so we need to find the cause of your issue as it should work haha. 😊

@mdesignanimationsricardomo513 Жыл бұрын

Hey man...let me see if I have any luck with this problem and if you know anything about it. Can’t right click or drag items to create new layer, I have not got anything to solve that problem, do you know anything about it? Thanks in advance

@afssai 10 ай бұрын

Hey I tried to use the layers in ue5.1 but nothing happens. I drag the mesh inside the layer panel and release and nothing. Can it be any preference setting that I am not aware of?

@Midz13 11 ай бұрын

Great video! All of my post process materials are rendering, so they are definitely active, but the renders are always black. Any ideas?

@andrewwelch5017 8 ай бұрын

You probably have Nanite meshes in your scene somewhere. Disable Nanite completely by entering "r.Nanite 0" into the Console. Once you are finished rendering your layers you can enable it again with "r.Nanite 1"

@three-diverse Жыл бұрын

On my project we wanted to use render/stencil layers, but we needed to have the render rendered in full, so with the background of the other layers present, similar as you would do in the editor by turning on and off layers. Is there a possibility for this?

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

As of now, no, unfortunately not. What you're describing is the way real render layer works, like offline renderers such as Redshift or Cycles, but they don't work like that in Unreal Engine. The closest thing I can imagine is to render several times and for each render turn off "one layer". But then the recreation of the layers in comp feels unnecessarily difficult.

@denissinchenko2624 Жыл бұрын

Hi, I have this problem, I want to get a cryptomat for the scene, but it has a forest and a fog card, when I output with object ids, the fog cards overlap the forest that is behind, how can I protect them from object ids?

@davidratajczak8408 25 күн бұрын

Hello, I do have a VFX oriented question : is there a way to remove a sky from a render so we can replace it in comp with a matte painting instead ? Like keeping everything we see in Unreal Viewport, including atmospherics, but with an alpha channel for the sky ? Important thing : forest environment : already tried cryptomattes but I do have super annoying artifacts around the leaves Thanks a lot

@AlmazovS 9 ай бұрын

Hi! I don't see a background in DaVinci as a layer (Sky). What could be a problem?

@rendered_useless2093 Жыл бұрын

Please could you help I'm trying to do this process in Unreal 5.2 but it doesn't seem to be working (we tried on two different systems) When dragging and dropping actors into the layers panel nothing happens, also when we right click in the layers panel nothing happens - no dropdowns or menus or anything Thank you!

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Strange! I will look into this!

@MichaelFamily 10 ай бұрын

Hi. Can u help me pls? I spent all day testing a render passes but my world depth pass, motion vectors are completely transparent - cryptomatte, reflections are fine. I did like epic said in documention, like you show but nothing.

@user-wl6rz8jq8w 11 ай бұрын

Great

@tiedtkeio 11 ай бұрын

Thanks for watching my video! 🙂

@crypt0sFX Жыл бұрын

Is there anyway around the nanite issue without disabling nanite?

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Not that I'm aware of. I've researched this quite a bit, but as of right now, sorry no.

@crypt0sFX Жыл бұрын

@@tiedtkeio Dang. Yeah, I've just been turning nanite off on everything.

@sachak 5 ай бұрын

So I am using Unreal 5.3.2 and set this up exactly as you did in the video with a previous scene. I am using ultra dynamic skys. I have several landscapes etc. I can render the scene fine normally. but as soon as I do a layer setup I get out of memory and the render crashes. I have been at this the entire day, I have deleted pretty much everything out of the scene, landscapes etc. nothing seems to fix this issue. I remove the render layers and do a normal render and its 100% again. I am working on the ASUS Scar 18 Laptop with a 13980HX and 4090 with 32Gb DDR5 ram. This problem only happens when I try rendering layers. I opened another scene and same issue. I tried disabling nanites and that didn't work either. Any idea what the cause could be?

@Maxparata 3 ай бұрын

Have you found a fix for that?

@WardForger 11 ай бұрын

Is there a way to set the landscape foilages layer as actor/stencil layers for render pass?

@tiedtkeio 11 ай бұрын

Yeah you should just be able to drag and drop the landscape actor to its own layer! 🙂

@WardForger 11 ай бұрын

@@tiedtkeio You're missing the point. I can't separate the grass without selecting the whole landscape to set as stencil/actor layers. Is there a custom render pass for auto foilage?

@veithnurtsch1069 10 ай бұрын

@@WardForger you couldy try to create that foliage with a tool like GraphNLibrary or ia scatter...

@Pratheeshkutty Жыл бұрын

Thank you Bro❤🙂....please do a video of multi passes {specular, Diffuse and light maps..etc...} render in UE5.1.🙏❤

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Yes, coming up! 😍

@Pratheeshkutty Жыл бұрын

@@tiedtkeio Thank you 😊... How to render (multi framed) single exr file in unreal engine for compositing?..

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

@@Pratheeshkutty I show how to render EXR file with multiple frames for compositing at 7:27 😊

@Pratheeshkutty Жыл бұрын

@@tiedtkeio Thank you 😊 🙏

@Pratheeshkutty Жыл бұрын

@@tiedtkeio Hai Bro...when I render my sceane, out put is 119 frames 119 EXR files..How to compaine and compose it?..camera will move little bit front that's the animation only...any solution for this.... Render in UE one EXR for this??

@lovelettar 7 ай бұрын

Wow I already feel like changing to unreal , I faced problems like there is no occlusion relationship and contact shadow when layer rendering in blender, which is hard for me to after effects each layer...

@tiedtkeio 7 ай бұрын

Yes! Unreal Engine is great! 😍

@lovelettar 7 ай бұрын

Thanks for sharing!!🥳@@tiedtkeio

@hablalabiblia Жыл бұрын

Where did you get the ships from?

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

Sketchfab.com, just search "ships" 😊

@paulbarcos 10 ай бұрын

Anyone knows why my world depth is always empty after the render? I already disabled nanite in my project settings

@DariuszMakowski 6 ай бұрын

You need to unpremultiply alpha with rgb pass and then use alpha over it to use over blending mode correctly.

@tiedtkeio 6 ай бұрын

Yes, correct. You think you know stuff, but then you learn more every day haha. 😅 Thanks for contributing!

@DariuszMakowski 6 ай бұрын

@@tiedtkeio oh tell me about it, story of my live... and then you think u know stuff and it still wrong! But this looks like unpremultipled alpha issue. So hopefully that would fix it.

@andreiblackfish1185 2 ай бұрын

How can you add the fog to the layers ?

@shivangipriya4153 9 күн бұрын

is there difference between Layers and Data Layers? thank you

@3dvisualisatie 9 ай бұрын

Trying this workaround in 5.2 and cant get it working is that right?

@user-rr8ql8zi9f 7 ай бұрын

Hello, Bro! Im very surprised, but I cant assign any object in the scene to layer menu, why? also I can't create any layer in project, right/left mouse clicks in layer menu field are not give results, nothing happens..

@Purple_Chris 3 ай бұрын

World Settings, turn off enable streaming and then click disable world partition

@captainblack1346 Жыл бұрын

What about objects with transparency? Glass for example

@tiedtkeio Жыл бұрын

It works and the alpha/translucency is preserved. However it's a bit experimental so don't expect flawless results when working with a real time engine. Render layers works best in an offline renderer, like Cycles, Redshift etc. 😊

@captainblack1346 Жыл бұрын

@@tiedtkeio 👍 ok got it

@paulfedor9828 Жыл бұрын

Wow so as of now Nanite mesh wont render stencil passes?

@cr0uchingtiger 11 ай бұрын

Mine behaves very strangely. I chose to simply render out one foreground tree and a few meshes that comprise of one character. And that's it. What came out was 3 identical layers, each has the same thing: a bunch of leaves on the ground from the foliage painter and a distant 2d plane. Nothing else renders. There's a fair bit of nanite in the scene, but the character isn't nanite and he's nowhere to be seen.

@andrewwelch5017 8 ай бұрын

Disable Nanite completely by entering "r.Nanite 0" into the Console. Once you are finished rendering your layers you can enable it again with "r.Nanite 1"

@lleerman 5 күн бұрын

Thanks you! 🙌

@Edaurdoo 8 ай бұрын

when i throw the object onto the layer it just doesnt appear ://, do u know why?

@ThrillDaWill 7 ай бұрын

They've changed how layers work, this doesnt seem to work anymore. is there a work around for 5.2, or 5.3?

@tiedtkeio 7 ай бұрын

Hi, I will look into this using 5.3 and get back to you! :)

@ThrillDaWill 7 ай бұрын

thank you@@tiedtkeio

@sybexstudio 6 ай бұрын

Is this better than cryptomattes when compositing?

@tiedtkeio 6 ай бұрын

Not really. You can also get cryptomatte passes in Unreal. I do believe cryptomattes are for indiviual objects though, whereas these render layers can be grouped objects as seen in the video. I guess that's the difference. 😅

@sybexstudio 6 ай бұрын

@@tiedtkeio You can add multiple meshes to a folder and render ID’s. Set to folder and they will be combined

@aknittel1 10 ай бұрын

Anyone try the MRQ nanite in UE 5.2.1? Is it fixed?

@paulatreides1354 Жыл бұрын

it's bugged for me in version 5.1 , the layer panels is broken , cannot drag anything in there or right click

@rendered_useless2093 Жыл бұрын

same in 5.2

@TheSxW 6 ай бұрын

what if i dont have Layers in window drop down ?? UE5.3.2

@TheSxW 6 ай бұрын

nvm i was being stupid...

@tiedtkeio 6 ай бұрын

@@TheSxW Haha 😅😅

@inaizy 11 ай бұрын

Very useful! I would've appreciated some more software agnostic detail on the layer blending that explains the reasoning, instead of just walking through specific settings there, but this still helped me immensely.

@paulatreides1354 Жыл бұрын

a clown passe would be nice , but no way to do this in unreal as far as i know