Automatically disable C4D's Material Override when switching engines

[nwitchell]

There are times when I need a previously unforeseen buffer pass really fast and re-rendering the whole scene is unfeasible, so I will often switch to C4D's Standard render and use material override to make everything solid black except for objects with a white luminance material applied. This renders buffers out in a few seconds instead of minutes or hours which saves a ton of time when I'm up against a deadline. The problem is if the standard material override is still enabled when I switch back to Corona, Corona will render using those override materials instead of the scene materials. Further compounding this problem is that when you switch back to Corona the standard material override setting disappears from the render settings, so material override is still in effect but there's no visible indicator to signify that material override is on. If I catch this right after I render a buffer pass, I can usually realize quickly that is what's going on, but there have been several times where I forget about it and then pull my hair out trying to figure out why the scene isn't rendering properly. It would be great if some sort of check was implemented where when Corona is the active renderer it checks to be sure the standard version of that switch is disabled. Alternatively, it would be nice if the standard material override switch and the Corona material override switch were linked so that if one was enabled/disabled, the other would be as well. This would at least give a visible indicator in Corona that material override is still active. Thanks for considering!

[burnin]

Have you tried this using Takes?

I agree about "Override" - for a start, it should either stay on the menu, if it stays active with Corona, or be disabled. Or at least give user a notice.

[TomG]

Not entirely sure what end result you are after, so I can't say what the precise workflow would be, but there is the "render only masks" option in Corona which skips doing any of the rendering and just generates the Multipass stuff like masks etc. so "rendering" is super quick. You could do things like use masks with include lists, use a Render Selected list (including what is selected in the viewport), base a mask on material id, etc. to limit what shows up in the mask, and saves switching engines to do it.

EDIT - which is not to say the request for some indication that the other engine's override was left on etc. is not valid, but may in this case avoid you having to even think about that ;)