Render 1 object by itself but still get all reflections on it

#1

Wasn’t sure how to word a short title for this, but essentially I am trying to render one object by itself out of an existing scene while everything else that would reflect or shine on it will be turned off (the existing landscape). But, I need the object, which is slightly reflective, to render with the reflections, coloration, etc. as if everything else was still visible around it. Think of rendering a mirrored ball in your front yard, but you want to render only the ball with transparency all around it. I need to do this so I can composite the object, part of an animation, into another landscape with similar scenery and the object will appear to have the right reflections, etc.

I’ve read about turning primary visibility off on the surrounding scenery but leaving ‘appears in reflections’ on, but some of the existing scenery is paint effects plants, and I can’t find any render stats tab for primary visibility, etc. for them.
Then I thought about rendering this one object into a separate render layer. I put it into its own render layer (render layers are still new to me) but I’m also using physical sun & sky for lighting and I get an error that it can’t find the ‘sunDirection’ and ignores it. It renders as shiny, but the lighting doesn’t look right.

Anyone have suggestions on an easy way to have Maya simply render the one object by itself as though it was cut out of the original scene?
Thanks…
JT

#2

the easy way to do this would be to use a script that disables the render flags for everything BUT the selected object. So select your mirror ball and run this in the MEL command portion of the script editor:

string $objy[] = ls -sl -s;
string $alles[] = ls -s;

for ($n=0 ; $n<size($alles) ; $n++)
{
catchQuiet(setAttr ($alles[$n] + ".primaryVisibility") 0);
}

setAttr ($objy[0] + “.primaryVisibility”) 1;

if you want to re-enable primary vis for all non-selected objects, run the script above after changing the loop line to 1 instead of 0.