What an incredibly helpful reply, thank you!

I think the main nugget here for me is that I shouldn't expect Octane to be able to do the thing I'm trying to do. That's fine, but knowing that helps me abort banging my head against all the inscrutable render pass/layer settings and just use a ...

Hi there, thanks for the response. Can I ask you to be more specific? I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around "render passes".

To be specific, in my Houdini scene, at the top OBJ level, I have:

/obj/DiscoBall
/obj/FloorAndWalls
/obj/keyLight

The disco ball is pretty much what you might ...

Anyone?

I have a scene of a disco ball, and am using the PMC render kernel to try to render the reflected caustics. I can see a nice caustic pattern, and am wondering how I might isolate them for compositing purposes. I can't quite seem to figure out which render pass might be associated with this though ...

Hi Juanjo;

This method more or less works, with one exception:

I have a reflective/refractive object that I would like to mask for compositing purposes. I can add the "matte" geometry to my scene, and use Render Passes as you describe above to hold out the geometry the way I need. But: the ...

Hey juanjo;

I actually tried exactly this, in fact! But I was doing so inside the renderTarget node itself, and the OSL did not seem to work. Perhaps – at the point that code is running – there is not yet a render camera context (or something?)

I can definitely create physical geometry that ...

From what I can gather poking around other sites, it seems that my experience is working as intended (which is to say: this parameter seems intended for use with a second ENV map, rather than a 2d backplate).

I'm curious, then, how I might accomplish what I WANT to do (which, again, is having an ...

Hi there;

What is the "CAM Environment" setting on the Octane Render Target node meant to do?

I ask because it seems like it might be meant for using a backplate (such as a live-action image sequence) mapped to the camera, for compositing or reflection/refraction purposes, but when I try doing ...

At the risk of over-explaining: a "Matte" object as I'm using the term describes a piece of geometry that 'cuts a hole' through any object its in front of; usually used to hold out geometry for compositing purposes.

What is the correct way to create matte objects (or to otherwise hold out geometry ...

I know, I know, do it in comp, but hear me out!

Distorting CG footage with an ST map is something handily done in Nuke, but a license for that is pretty far out of reach for freelancers. Aftereffects makes ST map distortion a huge pain. I was delighted to discover Redshift has a camera parameter ...