Managing complex scenes in Blender can often feel like herding cats—frustrating and time-consuming, but we do it anyway. Enter VFX artist Robert Rioux, who has developed two free add-ons to bring order to the chaos: Render Manager and Light Editor.
Render Manager: Simplifying Render Layers and Passes
Render Manager offers a unified interface for handling render layers, allowing users to create, delete, or reorder them with ease. It provides separate sections to control which Collections or render passes contribute to each layer, with the option to copy and paste sets of passes between layers. The add-on also streamlines exporting render layers from Blender for use in compositing applications like Nuke and DaVinci Resolve. It outputs separate 16-bit color and 32-bit data passes—including Cryptomatte data—for each render layer, alongside an overall precomp. Additional features include converting Blender’s Z-up axis orientation to the Y-up orientation used in Nuke and combining individual components of glossy, diffuse, and transmission passes.
Light Editor: A Spreadsheet for Your Lights
Light Editor provides a spreadsheet-style interface for managing the lights in a scene. While simpler than the spreadsheet views available in software like Houdini, it allows users to toggle or isolate individual lights or Collections, with the option to filter by name or light type. This makes adjusting complex lighting setups more straightforward and less prone to error.
Availability and Licensing
Both add-ons are available under a GPL v3 license and can be downloaded from Rioux’s GitHub repositories: Render Manager and Light Editor. As with any new tool, it’s advisable to test these add-ons thoroughly before integrating them into your production pipeline.
