Hey, sorry to bother you guys again so soon, but wondering if anyone knows what would make portal lights NOT show the image behind them, in the background, wrapped in the environment sphere.
This is an old problem I never could figure out, and it's driving me crazy... I have a room environment where I want to use portal lights, but when I turn on area light>visible in render, the portal light blocks the view outside. If I switch that off, I get error messages about how it is supposed to be on. A couple years ago Manny sent me a test file which has portal lights working as they are supposed to, and I even imported my double-sphere environment into it, and the lights work ok with it (they don't block the background image), with "area light>visible in render" switched on. Portal lights with these same settings block out the same environment background in my project. It's one of those visible hi res background spheres, plus a visible only to secondary rays HDR sphere to light the scene. IT works in the test scene, so why not the real scene? I swear I've checked everything. In the test file it seems you can check all sorts of visibility options on and off, and nothing matters except keeping the 'visible in render' parameter in the PORTAL LIGHT/Color section switched off, and it still reveals the background, as should be. Anyway, if anyone has encountered this very frustrating problem, please let me know what I could be missing. Any ideas? Possibilities? Thanks, Nancy
