Hide Environement in Render

# 1 26-12-2008 , 12:58 AM

Registered User
Join Date: Dec 2008

Posts: 4

Hi,

I'm new to maya and to this forum and I'm having a problem when rendering a scene.

I have a sphere which reflects it's environement. The environement is a box with a hole and a sun and sky which shine through the hole. I included an image to give you an idea of the scene.

I'd like to be able to exclude the box from my rendered image while keeping the sphere and the reflections of the box on the sphere. I tried making two extra render layers where I put the box in one of the layers and make that layer invisible but in the render the reflections disappeared.

I am using Maya Mental Ray, Physical sun and sky, Raytracing and Final Gathering.

My goal is to be able to only have the sphere left (with reflections etc.) so I don't have to cut it out of its scene in Photoshop manually.

Do you know how to achieve this?

Attached Images

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# 2 26-12-2008 , 01:48 AM

Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2002

Location: Minnesota, USA

Posts: 3,709

Set the Display Attributes for the box to:

Set Primary Visibility to OFF

Turn Visible in Reflections and Refractions to ON.

Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com

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# 3 26-12-2008 , 01:50 AM

The Nurb Herd
Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: London

Posts: 2,381

turn off the primary visibility on the box shape.... under render stats.

Edit: you beat me! :p

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# 4 26-12-2008 , 11:52 AM

Registered User
Join Date: Dec 2008

Posts: 4

Thank you both! It works. Thank you for your fast replies user added image

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# 5 26-12-2008 , 12:23 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2002

Location: Minnesota, USA

Posts: 3,709

No prob

That's what we're here for.

Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com

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# 6 26-12-2008 , 02:33 PM

Lead Modeler - Framestore
Join Date: Feb 2003

Location: UK

Posts: 6,287

Instead of having to go to the attribute editor each time use this lil script I have handy for such tasks. Selct the objects you want to turn off in the Outliner and hit this script to turn off:

for($s in `ls -sl`)
{
setAttr ($s + ".primaryVisibility") 0;

}

and to turn them back on use this:

for($s in `ls -sl`)
{
setAttr ($s + ".primaryVisibility") 1;

}

NOTE: with regard to group nodes or parent nodes, IK, joints etc
splines, contraints....these must not be selected in order for the scripts to work, the scripts are geometry based only. But it still saves alot of time in the long run

Jay

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# 7 26-12-2008 , 02:46 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Dec 2008

Posts: 4

I have a new problem :blush: . I imported a model as an IGES file and this file consists out of about 150 surfaces. I can now turn the primary visibility off for each surface individually because if I select a surface I can access its shape properties in the attribute editor. But I can't access all the 150 shapes together.

I included an image of my assembly tree as an example to make it a bit more clear.

Do you know how to make all the shapes invisible together instead of unchecking a lot of primary visibility boxes? user added image