UPDATE: Yes if you set it up with rendering passes that is fine too. Material is not nessasary if you can solve it otherwise.
Hello, i need this solved as soon as possible, and i got a challenge for you guys.
Ive attached a Blend file for you to play with, i need a material applied to the Sphere only.
The sphere has to be transparent, but the Blue and red reflection has to be visable.
i prefer not having the reflection form the ground plane, nor the environment. only the lightsources.
What will this material be used for?
a so called “Light Catcher”. its a VFX project where we mix live action with CG footage, and in my shot ive got lights passing through, and we need that light to hit the characters aswell. so im sculpting a simple character and placing him on top of the live action footage, and wish to only render out the lights.
here is the shot. there are lights going past the car and we need that light to hit the character aswell.
It will render transparent, but if you mix the result and the footage with an AlphaOver, light that hits the sphere will be added to the footage image…
You are approaching this in a strange way. What you need is a bunch of render elements that express different light paths/qualities like direct and indirect light, reflection color and amount, reflection factor (fresnel or similar) and so on. You can render these elements separated for each light if you need to balance them later, use render layers for separating them. In comp use these elements to light the objects in plates.
To get all the qualities of light you don’t actually need a correct material at all, you can add all the shaders together, doesn’t really matter, because you need the parts separately, not the sum.
If you need a simple direct light, the easiest way is to use plain white diffuse placeholder objects and render each light onto separate render layer. Then you can simply add these passes to plate to get the additional light effect.
sorry for being so restricting, yes its fine to use rendering layers. in the end, all i want is a PNG sequence that is almost 100% alpha, and contain the reflections on the arm only. it will all be composited in after effects, and i dont want this render output to affect anything but the arm of the character in the scene.
Have you tried my sugestion? Here’s what it does:
Render (if you colorpick over the Sphere, you will notice that there’s actually color in it, thought Alpha is 0.00):
