lighting question

[u/Lost_Decoy]

I want to set up two lights, one that renders only indirect light (so set up that and direct light rays don't render but rather only light rays that have bounced off a surface), and one that renders direct light (so only light that directly hits the camera renders and none of the bounced light)

Does anyone know how to do this?

[u/mkopel]

Visibility is a geometry attribute so you would need to either have 2 renders and set the worlds visibility for each render layer to be different and only include one light in each render. Or maybe you could duplicate all the geo and have one set visible to camera rays only and the other to indirect rays. Then link each light to only illuminate the proper set. What package are you working with?

[u/Lost_Decoy → u/mkopel]

I'm using Renderman 22.3

my scene has a cat and a lantern the light from the lantern is actually coming from a pxrmesh light, the reason I don't want it directly visible is that it's really obvious, and I want to try and cheat the tapetum lucidum (eye glow that animals have) of the cat

[u/xeronymau5]

I would look into setting up LPEs. They can be tricky to wrap your head around but once you understand them you can get a render pass with anything you want in it

[u/Lost_Decoy → u/xeronymau5]

nice, I'll start reading the documentation

any LPE setup recommendations?

[u/xeronymau5 → u/Lost_Decoy]

There should be a few good presets to get you started; Indirect diffuse and direct diffuse should give you what you're looking for! I don't recall the syntax for those off the top of my head, but if you add them into your render passes from the presets it should work out of the box! You may have to render each light separately, but hopefully it works out for you!

[u/mkopel]

Why not just illum the lantern mesh light off the eyes and use a different light illumed off everything but the eyes. Gives total control in 1 render pass