raven posted at 5:51PM Sat, 09 September 2017 - #4313856

This is how I set up a light to not render but illuminate the scene, if it helps. Obviously the colour chips in the SimpleColor node and the Diffuse and Specular chips are RGB 0,0,0.

This is a render of a hires ball with the setup you use.

As you can see there is a faint outline. My guess is, and might be wrong, but that you render with ground plane visible? in that case everything renders black, which gives the impression that the light is off. But if thats the case, that you render with the ground plane visible, you run into other problems, which is much worse in my opinion. First is that you should never render with the ground plane visible, it does nothing but increase render times (from some tests I did, it increases the render times by about 70%), so why they would add it by default is a mystery to me, it really give people a bad impression of especially Superfly being slow, and this is even if you render just a simple scene, like a Ball, it still have to render the whole ground plane for no reason. Besides that the Ground plane also block HDRI lighting, which again in my opinion is crucial to get any decent lighting, due to the very limited light settings. And even if you could get some good lighting, without HDRI it would probably not be worth the time :D

And that bring me, to them adding better HDRI controls, like controlling intensity etc :D