Am slowly getting to grips with Vue Infinite 10 and have a rendering question.

Am currently working on a large scene containing 8 Poser figures. I'd like to render each figure on a separate layer to make it easier composite it later in Photoshop (to adjust colour, etc.). However, when I select a particular layer to render, it renders the whole figure and doesn't take in to account objects that may be in front of the figure (i.e.hiding parts of it). 

I need to be able to render just the parts of a figure/object that are visible and not the whole object. Am I missing something very simple or do I need to get into the world of masks, etc. ?

The way I've been doing it is to hide everything but one object and render a scene and save as a PNG file.  Then hide that object and unhide the next and then render and save as PNG.  I hide all objects to render any background I need.  Then I load the PNG files in separate layers in my photo editor.