Emit indirect light only maya mentalray?

malcolm

Hey is there any way to emit indirect light only say create a light or surface that only emits photons. I've tried creating a geometric shape and applying a white shader to it and then turning the ambient value up on the shader. This emits indirect light into the scene but even when the geo is tagged to not cast shadows and be invisible it still blocks indirect light indirect light coming from the skydome and other bounces.

bugo

did u try final gather?

funshark

Have you tried to uncheck all the options in the render Stats?

Firebert

mia_materials have a lot more support for indirect lighting options (actual GI bounce with backface culling, additional light source, GI/FG overides, etc). have you messed with these in conjunction with the mia_light_surface texture? i put up the architectural shader guide on my drop box. read through that on the indirect lighting stuff if your version of maya supports these shaders that is.
what about the irradiance settings in the MR tab of the basic maya materials?
can you post up an render image of the problem you're having with the render stat overides?

hijak

the object has mental ray attributes that can be overridden as well. It is actually controllable in 2 places. I think the first is in an object shape node, and the second is somewhere in between the material and the object (in your attribute editor) sorry i dont have it in front of me now so im not 100% sure.
Anyways there is a ton of settings for stuff like "visible to final gather" " visible to global illumination" try messing with these. I had a similar issue when surface sampling and was receiving errors from where objects intersected, by changing these visibility options i was able to overcome that problem.