hiding mxi emitter

[ki_cz]

Sorry for the idiotic question, but if I hide an mxi emitter I know that the "effect" of the light will still be visible, but I want to know if the reflections from the mxi will still be visible. So lets say I have an mxi sky, hide it so that it's not my background, will it still reflect the sky on a chrome ball?

 

I don't think it does, is there any way to make this work? I have a bunch of hdrs which are great for lighting and reflections, but not great for a background. Unfortunately if I hide them, I'm pretty sure I only get the light and not the reflections, and I really don't feel like modelling an entire massive environment just to get the right reflections.

 

did that make any sense ... like at all???

[Devin Johnston]

Why do you need to hide it, just render out an alpha channel along with your image and you can separate the background with no additional work. I'm assuming you’re going to be replacing the background anyway and even if you don't render out the alpha you can still cut it out in Photoshop.