I’ve found a problem when using an opacity map on the Matte, Shadow, Reflection Material, it seems to stop the camera map in the Background slot reflection correctly.
In a scene I’m working on I have shots of a model on green screen showing just the waist and hips, and I want text to move around the body on paths, I’m using Path Deform for this. The effects I want are for the text to go in front of and behind the model, shadows to be cast from the text onto the body and I want reflections of the body on the text. I thought this would be simple enough with the production shaders, using the Matte, Shadow, Reflection (MSR from now) material and mr Camera Map, I’ve been using the production shaders successfully since Max 08 but I havn’t used the opacity map on an MSR object until now.
Because the model is a complex shape and moves about I don’t have time to make geometry to match, so I’ve used a simple Cone/Cylinder stand in object in her place. I’ve applied an MSR material to the object, in the materials background slot I have a Envro Ray Switcher, it’s maps are mr Camera maps with the image of the model chroma keyed to a white background applied to them. This gives me the reflections on the text I want and shadows, but I need to cut out the stand in object to crop the shadows and the text going behind to the edge of the chroma keyed image. To do this I outputed a matte from the chroma keyer and applied it to the opacity slot of the MSR material with mr Camera Map. This does a great job of cropping off the shadows and behind text, problem is that now the reflections are all wrong, they work like the old style per pixel camera map reflections, if I uncheck the opacity map, they go back to normal.
I have been working on workarounds for this using some oldschool pre-production shader techniques (two passes, swapping reverse vampires), but I wanted to know if this is a bug/limitation of the production shader or if I’m doing something wrong with them.

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