OTOY Forums

Hi! I've been wondering, for almost all of my time using Octane... how is everyone else using the Render Layer's reflection pass in their compositing?

The way the pass looks now, all black with the objects reflection, seems almost useless for 90% of my compositing jobs.

Let's say I have a image plate of a very reflective surface:
And I want to composite this awesome 3d cube into it. Turn on Render Layers, Reflections, composite the reflection pass in using "Add" and oh no..
It's all transparent, which is definitely not what I want. So, at this point.. what does everyone else do? Is there some secret pass I'm missing here? My only workaround is to do a second render with a white material on my cube, and a Texture Environment cranked up way up so the object gets completely white, so I get a luma mask I can use for compositing the reflection:
That mask I can use to block out the reflective surface before adding my reflection pass onto it. Like this!
I mean.. I'll just continue to use this workaround for these compositing jobs, but it's a bummer that some sort of mask or alpha channel isn't built into the reflection pass. Has anyone found any better workarounds or.. better yet, is there actually a pass that gives me the mask I need?

We're on Octane v4.02.1-R3 in Cinema4D (but I assume this isn't a plugin-specific problem) and if the newer version have solved this problem, I apologize and will update promptly!

Cheers,
Jón

I'm running into a similar issue. Have you come across any other solve for this problem?

No, I haven't. The only solution I've found is to re-render your reflection pass with a white material to get a mask. I haven't tried the AOV system in the latest releases, maybe there's a way to get both rendered at the same time using that.

Hey,

Did you find a proper solution with the AOV system yet?
I am having exactly the same problem where I need an alpha inside of my Render Layer Reflection-pass.
Because I don't want to "ADD" it on top of footage, because it will lose the black parts of the reflection.