So you got yourself a shiny ball that reflects the environment hdr but you also need a lamp to cast shadows. How do I make it so that the lamp is not reflected in the ball so that it has a true reflection of the environment map but does not reflect the lamp that is in the scene to cast shadows?
Well I was kind of surprised to realize that when adding a sun lamp, there was not any type of ray visability settings to make adjustments.
I was able to do kind of what you wanted in CYCLES, by
-add a plane, set plane material to emission … this would be like your new sun or lamp.
-you will see that the plane is reflected on the sphere along with the environment … which you said you did not want
-with the plane selected … go into the object settings and look for ray visability down toward the bottom
-if you uncheck camera, diffuse, and glossy … you will not see the plane reflecting on the globe or see it in camera view. You will however still see the light and shadow it casts.
There may be other ways, but, I still would like to know why ray visability settings are not available when using regular lamps.
Correct me if I am wrong but I do not believe that emission meshes give shadow passes. Could this be done a with light path node in the node editor for the lamp?
I was just seeing glare in the shiny ball sorry, problem solved