Glass reflections question

[hsa]

I am trying to gain more control over reflections in post and probably making it much harder than it needs to be. I hid my glass, selected all my objects and told them not to do anything but reflect which works fine except for the fact that my HDRI reflections don't shop up. I am using mr sun, CIE sky with ariel perspective turned off and a background switcher assigned to my environment. The background is turned off to render black and I have an HDRI image in the reflect slot. I have tried turning the output way up but it still doesn't show. Am I going about this the hard way and if so what is the process for doing this easily and correctly

[WAcky]

The best way to do I believe is to use render elements and split up your render before re-assembling in a program like photoshop.

 

Which renderer are you using?

[hsa]

I am using MR in Max design 2009. I wonder if just rendering a separate reflection pass would be the best bet but I am unsure of the easiest workflow to achieve that. I have tried render elements but for some reason I can't figure out how to set-up the reflection, shadow, lighting elements and how to place them and blend them correctly in Photoshop. Diffuse and AO I have no problem with but the rest I am missing something for some reason.

[DanGrover]

I used MR for a fairly large project (3.5 minute animated short) and rendered out everything in passes. The normal passes tend to be a bit fubarred, but the Arch and Design Output ones are fantastic. There are a few caveats, though - any object not having an Arch and Design shader on it will render out black in the passes (though they will render fine in the normal output saved file). This can be a pain if you have, say, characters with SSS or something. Also, there are issues when it's used with fast rasterizer and mr exposure control (I don't know if these have been fixed since, though, or if there is a workaround). It's a fantastic way of working though. Specular, reflections, direct illum, indirect illum, transparancy etc all on different layers. It means you can really go to town in the post stage.

 

Remember, there's a big list of the A&D outputs in the list of render elements - it's the Output ones you want!