Having problem with creating an environment for the scene
 

Hi folks. I am new to maya and am having some problem with creating an environment for a scene that I am trying to make. I am creating a sphere around the scene with an outdoor image mapped to it for reflections and lighting, but at the same time I am trying to make a background also using an out door scene as an image plane. The problem that I am having is that if I just use the image plane as a BG, the reflections on the floor plane work fine as a transparent BG texture, but as soon as I include the sphere as an environment, the ground plane looses its transparency. Is it that both of these techniques don’t work together or am I doing something wrong here? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

post a screen grab we might be able to help dont quite understand what your trying to explain

Thank you murambi for the response. I am sorry if I didn’t explain it properly. I am still new to maya and don’t know a lot of proper terms. Ok here are the screen grabs. “Chopper 1” has an image plane used as a BG. In “chopper 2” I added a sphere around the whole scene with an outdoor image mapped to it. As you can see in the render, the ground plane lost its transparency and became black. I didn’t change any other settings. I spent almost 4 hours last night on it and finally gave up thinking that you cannot use an image plane for BG environment and a sphere with an image as a surrounding environment for reflections and indirect lighting together.

Then today I created a new file and re did the entire process, and it seemed to have worked fine as you can see in “chopper3” and “chopper4”. I know I must’ve been doing something wrong here, but I don’t understand, just adding the surrounding environment caused the ground plane to loose its transparency. I am still unable to solve this problem in that file.

chopper1

chopper2

chopper3

something might have changed to do with the direction of your normals thats the best explanation i could think of