I'm about to start rendering "for real", ie. putting out multiple different renders for one shot (various mattes, beauty pass, diffuse pass, spec pass, etc etc)..... I've seen this done in production countless times but never done it myself other than by hand, painfully.
Are there any tools or mel scripts that facilitate the process of "pieceing out" a scene like that? I can't imagine you're supposed to prepare your scenes by hand by turning this or that object/texture off or on and then batch render each one manually?