renderStacks 4.56

4.56 – 10/4/2026

• New – Merge Passes: a Merge All button, and a progress bar that shows how far a merge has got.
  
• Improved – Much faster in large scenes: switching passes, refreshing the pass tree, and copying, deleting or de-instancing passes.
• Improved – Merge Passes is much faster with many passes, and no longer slows down as more are merged (200 passes: 34 seconds → 3 seconds).
• Improved – Generate Pass per Camera, Pass Builder and passes from CSV are faster.
• Improved – Resizing the LayerSet Editor and Set Editor no longer stutters in large scenes.
• Fixed – Merging passes did not keep the order from the file: base pass modifiers arrived reversed, and pass groups were placed ahead of the ungrouped passes.
• Fixed – Loading a missing, damaged or non-renderStacks package could wipe the current setup.
• Fixed – A failed package export could stop later changes from being saved to the scene, and left an rsDepot helper object behind.
• Fixed – MakePreview MP4 could report a failed encode as successful (and delete its frames and FFmpeg log) when an older MP4 already existed. FFmpeg launch failures and leftover preview files are no longer reported as success, and a % in the output path no longer breaks encoding.
• Fixed – Execute could run actions against the previous pass when a pass failed to activate, and stopped entirely when an action pass modifier was disabled on a pass. The path length check could also miss an over-limit MP4 preview.
• Fixed – Camera multi-pass, overscan and render settings were not restored if a pre-render script or the renderer failed.
• Fixed – A pass that failed output validation left Auto Key, Set Key and the command panel changed.
• Fixed – Merging passes could change object visibility when multi-visibility was on.
• Fixed – Save modifier: “Repath as relative path” did not save when toggled.
• Fixed – Tractor submissions failed silently when the Tractor API was not installed.
• Fixed – XRef merges repeated layer work each time renderStacks was reloaded.