Background / Image... can I have reflection only?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hi all,

I’m not sure what the terminology is in Blender to do this, and am having a hard time finding out if I can do this…

Basically, I’d like to use either an image or an HDRI to wrap around the scene, see it in reflections, but keep the image map itself invisible.

So, for example, I could have skies / lights / whatever reflecting in the hood of a car, but have the “sky” in the scene remain black.

Bonus points: can I have a different image visible in the render?

thanks!

2

Just set up your nodes like this. If you want a different image use a 2nd image in the background node

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3

Thanks… ah, dumb question… what do I actually apply these nodes to? :slight_smile:

Been doing it for objects in the scene, but I don’t know where this one would go!

4

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5

Awesome! Thanks again.

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6

Just realized there’s no “Background” node in 2.8 (I’m using 2.8…) - any idea what to substitute? I can’t seem to find a “color-only” node.

7

There should be background node if you edit the world material (has its own dropdown) rather than regular materials.

For which renderer? If you want black in Cycles, you only need to change the Ray Visibility under world settings tab. Eevee doesn’t respect this for whatever reason (shading has scene lights and scene world turned on), and you have to do it as mentioned above, except you don’t have to plug anything into the second slot.

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