I've created a ground plane, then bumped up the refraction index to make it reflect an object placed onto it (in my case, a can of Coke). I want to make the Coke can brighter, but I don't want to increase the environment brightness. What I decided to do was add a plane geometry, then position it to face the Coke can and make it the same width and height. I then changed the material properties to emissive and set the brightness of the plane so that it lit the Coke can exactly how I wanted. After that of course I unticked visible to camera, shadows, and reflections. That worked great for lighting up the can how I want, but that caused a problem.
Unfortunately, the part of the ground plane near the emissive plane is also being lit up, which I don't want. Is there some way to make the ground plane ignore the lighting from the emissive plane, or is there some over workaround to light up the Coke can without effecting the ground plane?
Can you uncheck ground illumination in the lighting tab?
You can also delete the ground plane and enable ground reflections and shadows.
Hey mikejb-
Here is a workaround that may help you: set the material type of your floor geometry to Translucent, set the Subsurface Color to black, set the Translucency slider all the way down (.01 is as low as it will go, but this fractional amount of translucency is virtually indiscernible, especially on a ground plane), and uncheck Global Illumination. Use the additional parameters to set your textures as you like. I set up a very quick, simple scene to demonstrate. For clarity, I have left the emissive plane visible to camera for the example renders below.
Eric