Hello!
Is there a way to make a Collection contribute only indirectly to the render and/or mark it as a holdout?
Changing the visibility of each object in big scenes is kind of work.
What is the current alternative with VRay?
I’ve had an issue to support Blender’s holdouts directly logged for a while. In V-Ray this is usually called a shadow catcher and for the moment you should be able to do the same if you select all objects and do V-Ray/Tools/Make Shadow Catcher. We will also add support for Blender’s holdouts too though. The indirect only option though… is a bit harder to apply to multiple objects quickly. You would need to do it through V-Ray’s object properties manually.
Having both options is something helpful, but I understand. These two properties are also related to the ViewLayers, so I guess they could be part of the same release in the future, right?
In the case of the Shadow Catcher, could we also have an option to revert what the tool does? Otherwise you must revert it manually too.
For the indirectly only, what I’m doing at the moment is using a feature of Blender most people don’t know that is pressing ALT when I click on the option I want to change. The ALT key propagates the action to all the selected objects. This is a workaround, since you need to select the objects everytime you want to change some properties, but works fine.