Shadows, lights, reflection, refraction

[Rico_uk]

We're now using Octane for 90% of our studio work, but the one reason we switch back to Vray on some jobs is because of the lack of control in Octane to control the shadows, lights, reflection and refraction of individual objects.

For example, in Vray I can:

Tell a light to be visible in an objects reflections, but the light isn't visible to the camera.

Set a material / object to refract black instead of the environment whilst keeping the environment for lighting and / or reflection (really useful for clean product renders)

Have lights affect only certain objects. (light lister)

Have objects not cast shadows and have objects not receive shadows.

etc.

I understand that a lot of this is tricky due to the nature of an unbiased brute force pathtracer, but I feel these are really standard controls that people will need for production work, especially animated work. I'm sure you guys can do it, I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts on this one; which would be the most useful. Personally the most important is having the light casting light, visible in reflections but invisible to camera (I can sort of do this using an object emitting light, but it seems like a fudge, and if it can be done in this way it should be possible with lights.) Adding the ability to have the light invisible to refractions but still visible in reflections would also be very cool.

[Berge]

Bump. This is exactly what I feel is missing right now, that is crucial to standard studio work.

[kreativninered]

Same situation...
Want to use octane, but for real job situation, toooo much pain with:
- no multi UVW map
- no controls over primary render parameters (like you mention)

but still I like it, and hope/wait some new release...

[coilbook]

Would be nice to have more options for daylight sun. Where i can have bluer sky for cartoons but shadow will have independent color like less blue.

[HHbomb]

+ 1 , shadow intensity and color should be controlled by user.

[Onra]

+1, same here, shadow intensity and color should be adjustable please. But i love the software and it's capabilities!

[abstrax]

To reduce the contrast of the daylight shadow, increase the sky turbidity.
To make the shadow edges softer, increase the sun size.
To change the shadow colour, change the sky colour.
If you want a crazy colour background, compose the rendering on your crazy backdrop.

[darkline]

I said this over a year ago, but it's the variety of lights that cause a problem.

In most other renderes I can create spot lights, control the cone size, falloff of the cone, attenuation of the light distance with start and end points.

This is crucial when you're trying to match plate footage or sculpting light. I feel octane has very blanket crude lighting at the moment. Fine for exteriors or general daytime shots, but it's hard to finesse the lighting with octanes limited light options.

[profbetis]

Use IES Profiles. Anything you ever need will be there.

[coilbook]

+1 for shadow color again. Here is why

We make cartoons and we need nice blue sky but then shadow gets too blue. We can only use AO diffuse is out of the question due to render speed and too much noise. (fake diffuse would be cool for animation even it is not 100% accurate a little color bleed option) But when we desaturate the sky to create less blue shadow, sky looks dull and not glowing blue. Please separate channels for sky color and shadow color and a check box to connect them like they are right now. And sky glow.
Thank you