Solid colour background with YafRay GI?

Technical Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi, because I’m generally useless at texturing, I usually do cartoon-style projects that don’t require it. In these situations, the style I like to aim for in the final render is a clean background, but there has to be a shadow or something to ‘tie’ the model down to ground.

When using Blender Internal, it is possible to set the material for the plane to only shadow, and it will render all the same colour for anything not shadowed.
However, if I use GI to get soft ‘shadows’ this won’t work. The only way I’ve found with YafRay is to bump up the emit setting, but this tends to wash out the GI, and it is impossible to just use an arbitrary colour - it’s necessary to tweak the emit value to get it approximately right. So! Does anyone know a better method?

In a nutshell, what I want is for the colour of the rendered plane to be determined by the value I set in col (or that along with the world background, if need be) except where there is ANY shading influence that isn’t caused by distance and angle between the plane and lights. (i.e. Shadows, GI, Reflections, Caustics, although mainly GI for this one.)

I have tried:

(Obviously) setting material to full white, with full ref.
Making the material shadeless and/or only shadow (works with internal renderer, not YF GI)
Removing alpha.
Tweaking emit (Is able to make a full-white plane, but washes out GI)

I think that’s it, thanks in advance.

2

And you need that model in a nutshell?

Kay, bad joke. I can take it.
Render the background alone with the internal renderer and render the object with Yafray with the original bg to receive shadows alone and render with RGBA.
P

3

I’ve not quite understood what you suggested (apart from the nutshell joke ;)) but would that not result in there being no GI on the floor in the YF render?

4

Well, when you render with the internal renderer you have the option to have say a groundplane only receive shadows so later in post pro you can see the shadows but no plane.
If Yafray can do this too then I think this is what you wanted.
All you have to do then is render only the groundplane later on with the INTERNAL renderer but with a solid shading.
In post pro you put the two together.
P

5

But if I render the floor internally it won’t have any GI…