How can I hide a HDRI sphere during Sequencer recording?

Hi,
I lighten my scene with a HDRI image, but I don´t want to see it when I record a movie with the Sequencer.
Every attempt to hide the HDRI sphere during the recording/gameplay lead to a loss of the reflections on my car.

When I toggle the visibility in the Scene Outliner, the reflections on the car are still there.
For this reason there must be a solution for this problem. This is also one of my major feature requests for the Unreal Engine.

Best regards, Andreas

Are you lighting the scene with SkyLight? If so, you can set the Source Type to SLS Specified Cubemap and set your HDRI as your cubemap without needing to use HDRI sphere.

Thank you very much for your answer. To use a HDRI in the Skylight is also one possibility. This is right.
Unfortunately I have more precise control when I use a sphere with a HDRI material. There I can adjust the brightness, the contrast and the rotation about all axes of my HDRI. But at the moment I don´t know if there exists a solution to hide the HDRI sphere in the game or while recording a movie…

Unfortunately this sounds very complicated… I am sure that there must be a solution. When I toggle the visibility of my HDRI sphere in the Scene Outliner, the reflection of my car don´t disappear. For this reason it must be possible. Perhaps there is a special console command or something else to archive this…

I see. Another thing you can do is render multipass (final image and stencil pass/ID pass) without depth of field and motion blur, and use editing software to key out the HDRI sky with the ID pass. Also may I ask if you can post the material setup for the rotation of the HDRI image, I kinda need it aswell :slight_smile:

Oh if the reflection doesn’t dissapear, did you try to keyframe the visibility in the sequencer and start the render region sooner so that the initial render starts with the HDRI visiblility enabled, but you disable it before the actual shot occours?

I found a solution which works perfectly! Create a second sphere with an unlit dark material. This sphere must have a smaller radius than the HDRI sphere. In the details window uncheck “visible in reflection captures”. That´s it. Now you have a dark background without the HDRI sphere. Of course you can exchange the dark material with a sky or something else.

This is only a workaround. I hope EPIC will integrate a function in the future to hide a HDRI sphere in the final rendering like in any other 3D programs.

I think there is a misunderstanding. When I toggle the visibility with the eye symbol in the Scene Outliner of my HDRI Sphere, the reflections stay there. When I disable the visibility of the sphere in the Detail Window, the reflection disappear. There must be a workaround to hide the HDRI sphere in the game. But unfortunately I have not the knowledge to archive this.

In the Sequencer, add the HDRiBackdrop to the timeline, then click on the plus icon next to it and select Actor Hidden in game. Uncheck Visibility and set a keyframe on the first frame. This should do the trick.