yes and no. hiding the default partitions for geo and lights is common practice – almost an absolute rule afaic for lighting/rendering scenes. (it’s inexcusable not to do this in production scenes for rendering with more than a handful of passes) every newly added object gets hidden by default – which is great for not messing up an existing setup, but not so user friendly to work in the scene – for layout and modeling in particular. To accommodate this - you can keep the default pass with both (or just the geometry one) on “no effect” - so it’s easy to work in the default pass - just make sure to never render it.
However, I am strongly opposed to explicitly setting visibility (= using “show members”) on all or most partitions – as I’ve seen some people do. This will unhide hidden objects and is almost guaranteed to cause trouble at some point. If an object was hidden, manually or otherwise, it should stay so by default – so use “no effect on members” on pretty much every partition other than the default one. This way – if you have a scene with plenty of passes – and then hide an object – it will be hidden in all passes. To hide it only for this pass, just drop it in the default partition. Very intuitive. Only exceptionally should partitions force visibility with “show members” – and only for the very purpose of unhiding hidden objects – and I’d put something in the name of that partition to make this very clear (“unhide” or “show all” or ...) I’m also not a big fan of display overrides on partitions – such as setting the wireframe color – as the override doesn’t let you change other display settings such as putting an object to hidden line or shaded or so - it's just more trouble than it’s worth. if you have a clearly defined workflow / pipeline /departments you can be more heavy handed with the overrides and partitions – especially in scenes for lighting. But if you have a more organic or freestyle workflow – switching back and forth between different tasks, from modeling to rendering, in the same scene, shared among people – then there is a fine line to thread, being properly organized in scenes while keeping them unintuitive for all to work in. From: Andi Farhall Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 11:38 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Hiding background partitions etc My particular workflow is to always hide background partitions for both geometry and lights and to explicitly set visibility of all partitions, and I do this as i feel it gives me a more secure control over what shows up in renders. I currently experiencing some scenes which use a much more relaxed approach to object visibility and whilst i wrestle with them i'm contemplating making some suggestions to my superiors, but thought it wise to garner some opinions here, just in case i'm completey wrong.... cheers, Andi. ........................................................................... http://www.hackneyeffects.com/ https://vimeo.com/user4174293 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/andi-farhall/b/496/b21 http://www.flickr.com/photos/lord_hackney/ http://spylon.tumblr.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------
