RT GPU and invisible lights

[ricoholmes]

While at our studio we do everything from TV spots to illustrative shorts, the bulk of our income comes from product shots from corporate clients. For the most, these shots are set with HDR domelights as the foundation and textured rectangle lights for specific highlights. Because of the angles required a lot of these highlights need to be placed in relatively awkward spots for the camera, and for CPU rendering this works superb as long as "invisible" attribute is set for the lights.

We've been switching over to GPU rendering of the shots wherever possible as the speed increase is immense, but of course the invisible attribute causes refraction etc to misbehave terribly on GPU.
While we can turn off the invisible attribute and have the shots rendered as required (fast!), the backgrounds become solid as they're picking up the domelight. Without a functioning Matte option in materialwrapper (we used to use a huge wrapper ball with shadows etc off when needed) I can't think of any optimal way of getting that alpha knocked out in GPU renders.

Is there any likelihood that invisible lights will start to behave as they do in CPU renders, or that materialwrapper's matte option will function anytime very soon?
Failing that, any advice ?


Its a lot of products, and as these regularly need updating, it's very important we keep catalog continuity. Starting afresh is a no-no,
Thank you in advance
/RH

[Svetlozar Draganov]

The GPU rendering is being improving everyday so important features like matte-surface will be implemented at some point but as always we can't specify when exactly this is going to happen.
Would it be possible to give us more information about the invisible lights issue you are facing since I am not sure if we have a note about it into our system?

Thank you very much in advance.

[ricoholmes]

Certainly, I'll put a rough scene together quickly for you and send to support.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thank you very much for the provided scene, we managed to reproduce the issue and we added a note about it into our system.
We will let you know when we have some progress on that regard.

Meanwhile it is possible to workaround the issue for the dome-light if you assign the same texture into Reflection/Refraction slots of the Environment overrides.
Sample scene has been sent via email.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

The invisible light issue has been fixed for the next service pack.

[ricoholmes]

Ah superb, thank you. The workaround was acceptable in the interim - I forgot to say thank you for that as well before.