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Octane Environment and Visible Environment are great for sky backgrounds, but have their limits with animation, because they are tied to the camera position.

...i.e. if you dolly or track, the whole world moves with you. Which looks crazy.

So... I've created a sphere (Sky Dome) around the scene, and textured it with an HDRI through an emission node to get the same background, and all stays still regardless of camera move. Perfect, but with one problem: It blocks out all other environment light, and Octane Daylight.

This does work pretty well as an environment on its own, but it creates a lot more noise, so I'm trying to optimise...

Question: Is it possible to make the sphere transparent, so it lets environment/Daylight through, has no effect on the scene, but still shows as a backplate?


Thanks.

You can set the Opacity of the Diffuse material/node to 0 and then enable "Transparent Emission" on the Emission node

Whispermode wrote:
Question: Is it possible to make the sphere transparent, so it lets environment/Daylight through, has no effect on the scene, but still shows as a backplate?


Thanks.

I did similar setup a few times. I used render layers. One layer with scene and on the other there was sky only. Composed both in AE afterwards.

ChrisH wrote:You can set the Opacity of the Diffuse material/node to 0 and then enable "Transparent Emission" on the Emission node

Interesting. I'll give this a try. Thanks, Chris.

J.C wrote:

Whispermode wrote:
Question: Is it possible to make the sphere transparent, so it lets environment/Daylight through, has no effect on the scene, but still shows as a backplate?


Thanks.

I did similar setup a few times. I used render layers. One layer with scene and on the other there was sky only. Composed both in AE afterwards.

Thanks, J.C - this makes sense. I'll give it a go after Chris's suggestion.

Whispermode wrote:

ChrisH wrote:You can set the Opacity of the Diffuse material/node to 0 and then enable "Transparent Emission" on the Emission node

Interesting. I'll give this a try. Thanks, Chris.

Chris - I couldn't get this to work, but solved it with the Raytype OSL with some pointers from a MODO thread. Setup looks like this:



...no idea what it's doing, but it works.

I'm still interested in your version, though...

I think I misread your question the first time.

You can see what I meant in my first answer see the attached screen shot.

If you just want it as a backdrop you can try to disable "Shadow Visibility" on the Sphere in the Object Data settings (This should work fine with opacity at 1 etc):

Then it won't obstruct the environment light. But NB: When you do this the "environment" (like the sky) won't be visible in reflections, but the light (the sun) will be.

If you want to have the HDRi visible in the reflections and refraction you have to have "Visible on Specular" enabled on the Emission node.