Hiding light sources, but still casting light - Maya

[swagstaff]

How do I make Octane Light objects cast light, but not show up in renders as visible objects? Seems they invariably show up as visible light objects if I'm looking at their facing normals, rather than viewing them from their back sides. As far as I can see, hiding them, or parenting them to a hidden node, causes them to not render.

[TBFX]

set their opacity to 0

T.

[swagstaff]

Thanks. It looks like setting opacity to 0.0 does make the light sources disappear from the render, while preserving their diffuse illumination. Unfortunately, this also causes them to have zero reflection contribution. Doesn't make sense to do one and not the other. I want ALL of their contributions to stay the same, but I don't want to render the big white rectangles strewn about my scene.

[TBFX]

Ah that's interesting, If you have no roughness at all on your glossy or specular materials they won't pick up the reflections from a light with opacity = 0 but so long as they have a little roughness (even just 0.001) it works fine.

T.