How to hide this plane which ring is laying on, but keep it's reflection and lighting on scene. Because if I hide it, light can't bounce of it and light the scene. Is it possible to hide it without losing affect on ring.
3 Answers
Go to the Object Properties, scroll down to Visibility > Ray Visibility, and disable Camera and leave everything else enabled. This hides the plane in the 3D Viewport as well, but only if you switch to Rendered View.
So here are examples of how it looks: on the left the plane is visible, on the right it is invisible to the camera, but it's still visible in the reflections:
To make it more obvious that the plane gets reflected and not just the rest of the environment, I've made the plane blue now. As you can see, the reflections are blue as well:
If you want to keep the shadow visible on a transparent background, instead of disabling Ray Visibility > Camera, you should enable Visibility > Mask > Shadow Catcher to get the following result (camera visibility needs to be enabled, otherwise the shadow would be invisible, too):
-
$\begingroup$ When I do this, I lose the reflections. Somehow all the effects disappear when turning off the camera. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 9:10
-
$\begingroup$ @BrunoSuraski I've edited the answer to show the effects. If it doesn't work, you must have done something wrong somehow. I'm not sure what you mean by saying "all the effects disappear", since the main effect was basically just the reflection. "Turning off the camera" - you mean camera visibility on the plane object like described in the answer or where do you turn off the camera? $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 9:49
-
1$\begingroup$ Much better but still isn't exactly same. It loses a bit of reflection on sides, is it closest as we can, or I could do some tweaking $\endgroup$– RadoonCommented May 18, 2022 at 13:32
-
3$\begingroup$ Why complicated, if you can do it simple … $\endgroup$– TheEagleCommented May 18, 2022 at 22:12
-
1$\begingroup$ @Radoon you can replace the Diffuse BSDF with the original material of the object in mix shader $\endgroup$ Commented May 19, 2022 at 2:19
-
1$\begingroup$ @Programmer I upvoted your comment, but I can actually imagine a reason: instead of deactivating camera visibility, you could use this if you only want specific parts of an object invisible and give the rest different materials, rather than hiding the complete object. Or linking a material like this to many objects instead of setting them all to invisible for the camera. There are always pros and cons for different methods and so these answers might help others with slightly varying tasks. $\endgroup$ Commented May 19, 2022 at 8:56