Override individual objects and lights per pass, in one scene. One click to render them all.

Product shots, archviz and motion work need the same scene rendered several ways: the hero alone, a shadow-only layer, a clay version, a mask, a different lighting setup. View Layers get you part of the way, but they work on whole collections, and many of the settings you need belong to the object itself and are shared by every layer: ray visibility, shadow catcher, what each light reaches. The usual workaround is duplicating objects into extra collections just so each layer can treat them differently, and every copy is one more thing to keep in sync whenever the model or its animation changes.

ANYpass works on individual objects and lights instead. Each pass picks any objects in your scene and changes their state only while that pass renders. No duplicate objects, no extra collections:

• Objects: hide them, hold them out, make them shadow catchers, swap their material, or set ray visibility (e.g. invisible to camera but still casting shadows and reflections)
• Lights: turn individual lights on or off per pass, or change what they reach: camera, diffuse, glossy, transmission, volume
• Pass settings: world, samples, and the ones View Layers can't vary at all: color management, output format and transparent background

So beauty, product on transparency, shadow only, clay and a key-light-only version can all live in the same scene and render in one go.

How it works

1. Add a pass. ANYpass lists the objects and lights in your scene.
2. Group objects into partitions and decide what each group does in this pass: hidden, holdout, shadow catcher, a replacement material, or custom ray visibility (e.g. invisible to camera but still casting shadows).
3. Set pass-level overrides if you need them: world color or HDRI, transparent background and glass, output format, color management, samples, Blender render passes.
4. Preview any pass in the viewport, then hit Render Queue. Every enabled pass renders to its own folder, stills or animation.

When the queue finishes, your scene is back exactly the way it was. Saving while a preview is active is safe too: the preview state is never written into your .blend.

Per-pass control

• Partitions: visibility, material override, holdout / shadow catcher, ray visibility per object group
• Environment: world color or environment texture and strength
• Transparency: transparent background and transparent glass
• Output format: PNG, JPEG, OpenEXR, OpenEXR Multilayer, TIFF, Targa, BMP, with color depth and compression
• Color management: display device, view transform (including AgX, Filmic, ACES on Blender 5.x), look, exposure, gamma
• Samples: max / min samples, noise threshold, time limit, denoise
• Blender passes: Z, Mist, Normal, AO, Denoising Data and more, per pass

Overnight queues: render log

Turn on Render Log and every queue writes a log next to your .blend: each pass, each frame, whether it rendered, how long it took and when it finished, plus the total time. It is written frame by frame, so if Blender crashes overnight the log still shows exactly where it stopped. Turn Overwrite off and run the queue again to render only the missing frames.

Good to know

• Cycles only
• Blender 4.2 to 5.2 (tested on 4.5 LTS and 5.2 LTS), installs as a standard Blender extension
• Skips frames that already exist when Overwrite is off, so an interrupted animation queue can pick up where it stopped
• Runs inside Blender's interface; command-line / render farm rendering is not supported yet
• No internet access, no external dependencies

What's new in 2.1.2

• Render Log: passes skipped because Overwrite is off now show as skipped instead of as errors, and the summary counts them separately from finished passes
• Render Log: a pass that was interrupted by a crash keeps a clear crash mark in its heading
• Fixed: total render time in the Render Log was counted twice
• Fixed: the last frame's log entry could occasionally be written after the log was closed, cutting into the summary

What's new in 2.1.1

• Fixed: Ctrl+click multi-selection collapsed to one object while a pass preview was active, so several objects couldn't be added to a partition at once

What's new in 2.1.0

• Blender 5.0 to 5.2 support (tested on 5.2 LTS); minimum version is now 4.2
• Fixed: switching output format between OpenEXR Multilayer and other formats could stop the render queue on Blender 5.x
• Fixed: a pass could occasionally start twice and save a file in the wrong format
• Fixed: transparent glass and output path were not always restored after the queue
• Color management lists now match Blender's actual options (Rec.2020, AgX and False Color looks, ACES on 5.x)
• Denoising Data pass toggle now works
• A pass that fails is reported and skipped instead of stopping the whole queue