reflection / refraction & alpha channel

[SnipeyX]

my assumption on this was that they are redundant, but intentionally so you can set it either at the material or object level.


(i.e. if I have a bunch of trees all with the same material, one mtlwrapper is the quickest way to go, but if i have a bunch of cars with different materials, rather than putting a mtlwrapper on top of every individual car material i can just select all the cars and change their object settings at once....)

[dynaman]

well, i had a friend who's more experienced with vray look at my problem and he came to the same conclusion - there is no way that vray 1.47 can give me the alpha channel i want in one pass.
the only way to do this is to render the scene in a second pass and change some of the global switches...he found that by disabling all the global switches, except for reflection / refraction, and hiding the non-visible background objects, you would get a quick render that generates the proper alpha channel.
still seems to me that vray should be able to do this in one shot, but this works and is a pretty quick fix. it'll have to do until i have a chance to try v1.5.
thanks to all for the feedback. (and thinks nick!)

PS. looking over this thread again, it looks like RErender had the same answer!