IRAY MATTE ENVIRONMENT STILL LIFE TESTS 22.06.

2012
The intent of this tests was to achieve a one-shot still life rendering of a generic product. The goal would be to have a rendering with studio like reflection and directional soft shadows against a white background whith virtually no use of post production (no fake shadows, cleaning etc). For this purpose matte objects would be the fastest answer to combine white bg with shadows.

intended result (mental ray)

this is the result i want to get with iray, the matte plane (matte/shadow/reflection) is excluded from reflection so it would mantain the softbox reflection

HDRI

MATTE LIGHT

1st TEST RENDER (iray)

Environment background switcher was used to pull off the hdr background in either cases (mr & iray)

no iray matte environment used here, just reflection and white bg switch, ill use it as reference in the next part

1st TEST RENDER

2nd TEST RENDER

just changed the bg color to better see the non-contribution of the background in the reflection. it will be important in futher tests. we could assume we want a red bg with shadows (the process would be the same)

2nd TEST RENDER

3rd TEST RENDER

matte environment whith hdr.

3rd TEST RENDER

4th TEST RENDER

when you turn on the ground plane youll see it in reflection...not cool

4th TEST RENDER

5th TEST RENDER

bg switcher is plugged into the environment map on the iray matte environment to get the red (or white) background but as you can see not only the ground plane is being reflected but you can also notice a strange part of the red ambient being reflected.

mental ray

iray

here you can see the difference between the final result (left what was wanted right iray rendering with matte) mental ray & iray notice the much more realistic shadows in iray is one of the wanted benefits of using this technique.