Reaper Region Layering + Rendering

Intro

In this post, we’ll explore a basic, yet commonly overlooked method of rendering a large amount of categorised assets in a structured and automated way within Reaper.

If your project looks a little something like this:

…or whether you’re exporting game assets, grains for your retro-speech system, or just looking for an easy way to export your edited foley work, this region layering method is perfect for you!

Region: Layering

First things first: the requirements.

This rendering method makes the most sense when rendering multiple assets of multiple different types. For the purpose of this post, we’re going to take a few one-shot ambience assets as an example: bird chirps, rustling leaves, and crickets.

After you’ve gone through your typical design process and are ready to render your assets, the first thing you’ll want to do is create one region per asset (Shift + R by default). The names aren’t important, so feel free to leave them blank!

And now, we get to the actual layering!

For each of the asset types (birds, leaves and crickets), create one region, and name them accordingly, prefixing each name with “TYPE=”. This will create the region category “TYPE”, which we will use for organising our render output names.

That’s it for setup. Now we move on to rendering!

Region: Rendering

First thing you’ll need to do, is to select the regions you want to render. Since we don’t want to render the “TYPE” regions, but the regions within, we’ll have to set things up accordingly.

Open up the Region/Marker Manager (CTRL + Shift + R by default). Select all regions except for the “TYPE” regions.

(Tip: To make this easy on you, you can just select all (CTRL + A, or Shift + Click), and deselect the “TYPE” regions by pressing CTRL + Click on each)

Setup is done, time for the real magic! Open up the Render to File window (CTRL + Alt + R by default), change the Bounds to “Selected Regions”, and start enter the names for your files.

While naming, it’s important to include the “$region(TYPE)” wildcard somewhere, as this will differentiate the different categories of assets you’ve created.

Once the naming is done, change any additional render settings you might want to apply, and press Render. After a moment, you’ll have all of your files, neatly named and organized within your output directory!

Region: More layers!

This was a fairly simple example to demonstrate how region layering works, but it can easily work for bigger and more complex projects!

Here’s a more complex example: a project for one-shot voice assets for civilizations of different planets that differ between primitive and advanced technology stages, categorised by mood: happy, annoyed and furious.

This setup will export all 96 assets neatly organised and named by planet, technology and mood, ready for implementation!

(The more eagle-eyed readers will notice that the per-asset region names all include an underscore followed by numbers. These were auto-generated by a script, which we’ll write about in a future post. Keep your eyes peeled!)

Conclusion

Creating and layering different region categories is a sure-fire way to hasten your workflow for larger reaper projects, and will speed up your asset-naming and rendering process immensely!

Enjoy!