Figured out and implemented render layers – now working through all the issues that come with the privilege of splitting one’s renders up, namely character foreground/background overlap. Apparently this is solved with the “Zmask” render pass. I’m having issues with the layering as the butterfly goes both in front and behind the trees. I posted and got some good answers, and eventually worked out what I was doing wrong. Also it seems my approach to nodal compositing was a bit off as this one fellow points out, and subsequently made me wonder why I ever did it this way to begin with, that I only need one Defocus (DoF) filter at the end of the chain rather than on each layer.
Got depth of field working so that it tracks the distance of the butterfly at all times.
Z-mask problems