Ground plane reflections

[potsked]

The issue:

An object, in front of a white/gradient background, casts a shadow AND a reflection onto a "matte object" ground plane that reflects only that object and not the environment.

 

The thing that strikes me most about this limitation is that it's the uber-standard on almost every other realtime rendering solution out there. However all of Vray's settings cannot accomplish this. Ground plane shadows are easy peasy lemon squeezy, the reflections are impossible.

 

Any time the reflection map is turned on, the entire plane snaps into view because if it's not reflecting the object it's reflecting the environment, wherever it's defined. once that happens you get a bit of object reflection and a whole LOT of environment reflection which occludes my lovely background gradient.

 

Distance Dimming does not help. While it removes far away objects, it replaces them with the environmental reflection, again occluding my gradient background. For context, I'm using a view-projected background defined in max (shortcut 8) for the rendering and a separate spherical environment (vray override) for the object reflections.

 

Has someone found a solution for this seemingly obvious visual style?

[JonRashid]

I have had this problem as well. I fixd by putting another white object behind my matte floor object and this fixed things.

[Stephen Thomas]

A workaround to create an alpha for the reflections would be to make your object a white Vray light material and have a black environment. Then render and use the reflection pass as your alpha.

[potsked]

I have had this problem as well. I fixd by putting another white object behind my matte floor object and this fixed things.

 

Sorry, can you explain this a smidge more?