Turn off visibility to camera, retain shadows?

[anowia]

My current workflow for multi pass compositing is to have one pass that is the background + shadows, and another pass is the foreground objects.
I don't know any better than to use the same workflow for fluids. But I can't do that, because I can't seem to turn off the fluid alone, but keep the shadows. Ticking "Visible to camera" off doesn't make any difference.
How do I do it? Or is the multi pass compositing workflow for fluids different?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hello,

Do you render liquids or fire/smoke? Which Phoenix and V-Ray versions do you use?

[anowia]

Vray 3.20, Phoenix 2.2
I'm rendering smoke.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

We can't reproduce this problem here, would it be possible to send a simple scene that has the issue?

It should work exactly like that - if you just turn off 'visible to camera' of the PHXSimulator object, you should have the shadows until you disable 'cast shadows' too. In case you are using a max light and not a V-Ray light, you should enable the volumetric shadows on the light, and use VRayShadow too.

[anowia]

Weird. I couldn't show you the actual scene file because it's confidential work, so I set up a separate scene to hand to you, and it worked like it should. Still can't get it to work in the original scene, but I merged the old scene into the new, and it worked, so now my problem is solved.
I don't know what I've done to the old scene to make it behave like that though.

[Ivaylo Katev]

if you find the reason for the problem, please tell us

[anowia]

I will! I'll try and reproduce it if I can.