Sharing a "scene" onto several Layers

Hi all

we tried several things today to no avail… we have a scene, a certain world we wanna use the same way in different layers, because this will be used in a show on a mediaserver, where we wanna switch between the scenes quickly.

One way to do this to create that world and copy it into each and every Layer. In terms of maintainability this would be a disaster, as if we have to change something in that overall world look, we have to do it in all 20 Layers, because those are copies.

So - is there a way to share the content of a Layer into the others?

Another idea was to build it all in one Layer and use render layer nodes for the objects that are different and then switch those Render layers on and of … I don’t know if that would work… performance wise (meaning our world setup is always there, all the other looks we switch on one after the other through a published value in the mediserver.

Any ideas, comments?

I also see that i can export a layer, but i cannot reimport that layer it seems - maybe merging would work but is also undocumented … and as I tried it and it didnt seem to work as i would expect. Even though that would as well not solve our problem of sharing a Scene (in one Layer) into all the other layers

Hey Urs,

It sounds like you want the Layer Precomp node.

This will pre-composite a scene so that it can be used in a different layer, and using the Video Multiplex node you can switch between multiple video nodes at once.

Below is a simple example for you to look at - hopefully it can get you started.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bHgIEsJZAIfW3v84L0tQ8qCFNH6OF6Ex

Thanks,

Ryn

nope, this will not help, because Layer Precomps Output is an Image - or isn’t it? We need to have the cameras from the WORLD Layer, and my models on the current Layer to interact with the Contents from the WORLD Layer…

The idea is more like in Cinema 4D you would probably use an Xref for the WORLD, and then create the necessarily different Scene situation with always the same WORLD.

Basically the idea is reusing parts of a scene from one Layer in another Layer (because thats how i would switch from one Song to another, through layers) without copying the contents into the Layer. More of a referencing …

Another Idea, although I am not sure if this is feasible… we could build all scenes in one Layer, and group the different scenes that are happening inside those WORLD into groups and just switch only the one on we need for the current setting… using a select Child Node, we could switch from Group to group just setting the number in the Mediaserver of the Group we want to switch on… but it will be a huge one Layer Project then…

Any updates here? I’m trying to do something similar.

Layer precomp can be helpfull to have many layers, same time, like after effects.