Reflection problem

Hoping I can get a quick answer, so I can do some overnight renders.

I’m using a decorative ceiling light in my arch viz project, that serves 2 purposes…decorative, but also I have an invisable light sphere to add more light to the room.

First let me show you the node set up for the light sphere… this is only for the invisable sphere… you can see that I have disabled camera ray visablility…so when the camera is looking at the ceiling light…you don’t see the sphere. I’m using this backfacing setup so the invisable sphere light does not blow out the artwork.



My problem is that I am seeing the sphere in 2 places … first the mirror where it appears Black. You also see it reflected in the window (but here it appears white)

But for this to all work like I hope, you shouldn’t see it all directly or in any reflections.


Any help would be appreciated…

can post your mirror/glass materials and your ray bounces settings? it looks that the problem should be somewhere in one of these configurations… :confused:

This is the mirror material … pretty simple as you can see.


Using full GI


If you don’t want to see the sphere in any reflections, why not just disable glossy ray visibility? What are you trying to do with that “is reflection ray” switch to no shader? (no shader is solid black, not invisible, btw)

EDIT: I’m guessing you want it in blurred reflections (spec highlights), but not sharp reflections? Plug a transparent shader into that last mix node in that case, and use the “is singular ray” output instead.

So the sphere is just for illumination and you don’t want the sphere to appear in camera or any reflections/refractions? If that’s the case, than you can set the object only visible to diffuse rays (by setting the ray visibility to just diffuse rays, or by using the IsDiffuse to mix with a transparent).

@J_the_ninga and Secrop First off thanks to you both for your help. I went ahead and tested turning off ray visability to just diffuse rays as seacrop suggested and that worked.

I used a similar light in other rooms and I think previously I had a room that had a lot of glossy surfaces which I wanted the sphere light to impact, that’s why I kept that on. But using only the diffuse ray visability seems to solve the problem. So thanks again to you both.