How to render reflections in biased mode (no GI)

[jan]

Hi,
is there any way to render reflections with corona, without activating a gi solver?
The only nearby solution we found is to convert all materials into a Ray Switch Material, leaving the GI-Slot empty, but this switches the shadows off.
So we doublicated all abjects, gave them a default material, set them to not visible (except casting shadows), to get our shadows back.
Now we´re not rendering without gi, but minimizing the use of it.

[romullus]

In order to turn off GI, set primary solver to none (render setup>performance>global illumination>primary solver).

[jan]

Hi romullus, thanks for your reply, but turning off gi is not my problem. the problem is, that when gi is off reflections are not rendered too.
We´re just in production, trying to reduce rendertimes as much as possible, so we´re faking daylight - rendering without gi, but we do need reflections in glass surfaces.

[maru]

Fakes in Corona is not a good idea.

The proper way of disabling GI with rayswitcher is putting a pure black material (diffuse 0, no other features like reflections) into the GI slot. Not leaving the slot empty.

[jan]

Thank You, this helps a lot! I know, corona is not the best choice for fake lighting etc. but we tried mental ray and found us intstantly dealing with artifacts, errors and crashes (gpu-ao) - exactly the reasons why we changed to corona ;-)