Render only a certain object with it's shadows and reflections?

[Bart247]

I have a project where I rendered out an office with a camera movement. I need to reuse the office animation for several different products. I basically need to composite different products on the table in the foreground so I'm rendering them separately.


The office with no product.




To render each product I setup a camera in the products position and rendered out a spherical map to use with a dome light as lighting and reflections for the product and so I can render it quickly. I placed a plane under the product where the white table is. With a VRay Mtl Wrapper on the plane I can get the shadows and reflections of the object, but I also get the reflection of the dome light...

I need the dome light to light and create reflections on the product, but I only want to see the shadows and reflections of the product on the plane.

What's the best way to achieve this?

[Bart247]

I figured out one solution is to enable dim distance on the plane's base material connected to the VRay Mtl Wrapper.

This removes the dome light from the plane's reflections since it theoretically is at an infinite distance away. That plus a raw shadow pass works perfectly for my project. But for future reference is there a way to exclude certain reflections on a per object basis like I asked above?

[yolov]

Hi,

There is a new feature coming up with V-Ray 3.0 (reflection/refraction visibility lists) that will allow you to do just that. With 2.0 I guess a possible workaround would be to play around with light linking and/or reflection contribution by setting copies of your lights as one will never affect an object's reflection and another will affect nothing but reflections.