Hidden walls and reflections

Drip

Sometimes, I want to make a long-focal shot of an interior, which means I (usually) have to hide a wall to do so. However, when there are reflective surfaces within the interior, that means that those reflective surfaces might reveal this "missing wall".

Usually, I solve this by moving the wall backwards, so it no longer blocks the camera, and then scaling it up and positioning it in such a way, that it more or less appears as it should in the reflection. However, I do this manually, and the positioning isn't exact. The lighting on that moved and scaled wall usually isn't entirely correct either. So, I was wondering what other tricks people use when they're in this situation.

Are there perhaps tools or tricks to make walls transparent only on the outside, but not on the inside? Or are there maybe tools able to calculate (to some degree) how far the wall needs to move and scale, based on (for example) the walls position relative to the focal point and the camera? (that still wouldn't give an exact result, but probably be more than good enough as a blanket solution)

Richard Haseltine

In Iray use a Section Plane (Create>New Iray Section Plane) then in the Parameters pane turn on Clip Lights - that will let you see through the elements on the near side of the plane, but they will still be there for lighting and reflections. It is possible to the same in 3Delight using a custom shader, but fiddly.

Drip

Awesome! A built in feature I didn't even know about! I'm definitely going to experiment with that, I just googled a bit for Iray Section Plane, and the results included some very interesting uses and benefits (including uses for reduced render times)