Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't been around in a while, but classes keep me busy. Hope all is going well for everyone. My question(s) is(are) - Do you use layers? If yes, why? If no, why not? What are the majore benefits and/or drawbacks to using or not using them? Thanks everyone for your opinion.

Of course, most of us use layers. Reason number one for me is the ability to make layers invisible, in exact terms to "hide" them. This means that the objects it contains are not visible while I'm working on my scene. This makes redraw VERY much faster. I do so if (i.e.) I have lots of vegetation I don't need to see when placing other (new) objects. These hidden layers content is only invisible in the scene, not in the render. BTW you also can hide only 1 or 2 or 3... objects of a layer. Second reason is that layers permits to organize your work. You may have a layer for the foreground, another for the background or a layer only for plants, one for terrains, one for lights and so forth. It's up to each user how s(he) likes to organize things. Wenn you need to find them later it is much easier if you know in what layer they are:-). Hope this helps, :-)Guitta

I layer everything; mostly for the second reason Guitta mentioned. It's much easier for me to find elements of the scene, like a particular plant or rock, if I put stuff in layers. I don't necessarily put all of one type in a layer, like all plants in layer 2, all rocks in layer 3, etc, but I tend to put things that are close together or have interaction with each other in separate layers. It just makes it easier to work with. It's also a lot easier, like she said, to hide layers to work on certain parts of a scene. I know some folks who don't layer, but just group stuff, and it seems to work fine for them. I suppose it's just a personal preference. I am quite fond of making lists irl, like lists of things to do, so the layers are kind of like a virtual Vue list for me!!

I'm a putz and I layer. Name changing and all. I do it like Guitta does, I think but I've wondered... As it is, I put all my lights in their layer, all plants in their layer, etc. I wonder sometimes if it wouldn't be better to put objects AND their lights in the same layer. Of course, people might just say, "whatever works best for you"...grin.

Thanks for the feedback. I've started using layers and now see the benefits of what you folks mentioned. It's easier to work on stuff when you can hide stuff. I'm finding by putting the terrains each on their own layer and then any items such as trees that go on that terrain are in the same layer. Layer one by default has the ground plane and sunlight, so for now, sky and light go in layer one. Hope to be able to show you something soon as a result.

I use bryce (don't have vue, but keep an eye in here)... and I've often wanted bryce to have layers for the above reasons.