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Sorry for the cross post but I hadn't had any replies on the Rhino forum and wanted to pick all of your brains over here .

Lately I have had to render some rings with large high polish metal areas and diamonds.

I have tried a variety of techniques- lighting using .hdri's, light boxes using .mxi textured emitters, flat plane emitters, different environments.

What I have found is that the lighting techniques for making nice reflections in the high polished metal are not the best for bringing out the qualities of the diamonds. An .hdri is great for the diamonds but not for the ring, a .mxi textured emitter with lightbox seems to work best for the high polished metal.

So I have come up with the idea of rendering the ring in one environment(.mxi textured light box) and the diamonds (black environment lighted by .hdri) in another and then merging the two.

Is this possible?

I read in the manual about the Shadow Channel but that looks useful for putting renders into set photographs.

Any tips would be welcomed!
Cary

I bet if you use the matte material switch you'll be able to get what you need

Hey Lebbeus- can you tell me a little more about the matte material switch? Thanks

Scratch that... I just found it in the manual thanks

You can achieve both in one shot using emitter planes. It took me 6 months to figure it out. Emitter planes infront of the diamond can give you full control of the scinitilation of the diamond while not really being shown on any prominent gold surfaces. Emitter planes behind and the the sides of the ring affect the gold surfaces with affecting the diamond.