Excluding surface from Uber Environment 2

Kibby

How can I exclude some surfaces from UberEnvironment lights?

I like how UE2 can fill light. I have some surfaces that I want them excluded from UE2 lights.

Would that require creating a new shader from shader mixer? What does the recipe look like?

Herald of Fire

What do you mean when you say 'exclude'? Do you mean that you don't want it affected by the light, or that you don't want it to affect the light?

vienastoks

My guess would be that the question is about UE2 bringing rendering to a crawl. :) Known problem with hair and some other stuff. Well, if you do have UberSurface 2, the shader can "upgrade" some surfaces to ignore raytracing and occlusion (there are a couple of switches near the bottom of "upgraded" surface tab). Maybe some other shaders could do that too.

graham james

The UberSurface that is part of DS4 also does this.
I turn off raytrace and occlusion then use a geometry shell for fantom occlusion.
Much faster render times

vienastoks

graham james said:

I turn off raytrace and occlusion then use a geometry shell for fantom occlusion.

I didn't know this shell and fantom trick. Is there some how-to guide for the process? I used just to switch raytracing and occlusion off.

graham james

After you have turned off raytrace and occlusion select the hair in the scene tab.
Go to create menu and click on “new geometry shell”
Select the newly created geometry shell in the scene tab and surfaces tab.
Apply ubersurface shader to geometry shell
In surfaces tab scroll down to where you’ve been turning off raytrace and you should see fantom.
Turn on fantom turn off raytrace leave occlusion on.
Don’t know if this is the correct way of doing it I kind of half remembered reading about it and then experimented.
I think it fakes the occlusion of the hair but does it quicker than the hair occlusion because there are no transparency maps involved.

Kibby

Yes, I don't want the surfaces to receive UE2 lights. I can go on with some examples.. Planet for example. When sun is behind it, UE2 will lit dark area which I don't want it to happen while I want it happening to the other objects.

wancow

render the background without UE2, then use that render as a background image for your final render.

avmorgan

Here's a more specific example: when using the uberenvironment2 light, the inside of the character's mouth is lit up. If the light could be set up to ignore certain surfaces, it would be very helpful!

mjc1016

avmorgan27 said:

Here's a more specific example: when using the uberenvironment2 light, the inside of the character's mouth is lit up. If the light could be set up to ignore certain surfaces, it would be very helpful!

Turn off SSS on the mouth surfaces...it's not needed 99% of the time and most of the time a character looks like he swallowed a lightbulb, that's the reason why.