Reflection only - anyone done it?

Hi,

Has anyone managed to set up a reflection only plane?
Like the shadow only catcher but for reflections.

It would be great to have control over shadows and reflections and compose them against 100% white… or any other color or image.

Well, you can kind of accomplish this with Cycles. You can make a render layer with just the reflection plane and then enable glossy indirect to catch reflections. You can then use a Mix node set on “Screen” to get rid of the black area of the glossy indirect. This is helpful for compositing CG object reflections into live video footage.

Oh! Just the info I’ve been looking for! Been trying to get a “reflection layer” to work.
Gotta try this when I get home.
Thanx! :smiley:

Can you please post a screenshot of the Node-Setup.

Many thanks for the Link, Steve S

You can also do a similar thing in BI, by the way. The RenderLayer node can serve up many distinct channels of information.

(And the MultiLayer OpenEXR file type, specifically, can capture them all. You must use this file-type in complicated compositing workflows.)

Thus, in addition to the “Composite” output, you have the various components that go into it. One of these is Reflection. (Doc page.)