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Area Light Reflections in Objects
Hey all, long time After Effects user here just beginning to stretch my C4D wings.
I currently have a pretty nice scene set up with a metal/chrome figure inside of a sort of a ‘snow globe’ glass orb. It looks really good after rendering, except for one small detail.
I am using 2 area lights with “Show In Reflection” enabled to get some nice hard reflections on the chrome piece, but they’re showing up in the glass orb as well, and they don’t look nearly as nice on such a smooth spherical surface. I’d like to be able to hide these area lights from the sphere but I can’t figure out how to do it.
I tried a Compositing tag to ‘exclude’ the lights from reflection in the sphere, but this doesn’t seem to work.
I think I could work around this issue by creating luminous objects instead of lights for my reflections, and disabling “Show In Reflection” on the area lights, but I’m hoping there’s an easier solution here.
Thanks so much!
Darby Edelen
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4 Replies
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I’d copy the light and have one of them only affect the globe (“include” in the light’s scene tab) and the other for everything else (exclude the globe). Turn off “seen in reflections” for the globe’s light.
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Sounds like a reasonable solution if I group the lights up properly 🙂 So far the render is looking good! Thanks.
Darby Edelen
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[Darby Edelen] “So far the render is looking good! Thanks.”
Spoke too soon. The lights are still showing up in the orb’s reflection. This is incredibly irritating 🙁
Darby Edelen
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Drat, looks like you’ve run head-on into a bug. It works if you uncheck “total internal reflections” in the transparency channel, but of course that changes the material’s appearance.
There is another workaround but this seems to show up an additional bugs, and/or limitation. The workaround involves having a luminous plane in place of the area light itself showing up in reflections. You would tie the position and rotation of a luminant plane object to the light’s position/rotation and exclude the plane from the dome with a compositing tag.
Unfortunately, when you do that the reflection still shows up unless you turn off “exit reflections” in the dome’s transparency channel. I think that’s probably a better option than the other workaround, but it depends on your scene and it’s a matter of taste.
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