Lighting specific objects in cycles with volumetric atmosphere I'm trying to set up a night scene, and having trouble getting the lighting right. Here's my first stab at it:



I like the lighting on the tree, but the cloak on the left is too dark.

I wondered about splitting the scene into two render layers, kind of like this:




I thought I could adjust the levels of the cloak in the compositor, but I can't figure out how to recombine the layers. Similarly, I tried adding extra lights to the cloak layer, but that interferes with the volumetric effect in an undesirable way.

Is there a good way to light the cloak, without affecting the rest of the scene?
A possible soution is not using volumetrics in the world setting but creating a solid that contains the whole scene with volume scatter shader.
Have that solid be in only one layer and have other layers with no volumetrics to light the objects.

For example on a scene like this:



I added a cube that surrounds the whole scene and added a volume scatter node as volume to create the volumetrics.





on a separate layer I have the object on the left with separate lighting and no volumetrics.



I render both layers separately and combine them in the compositor: