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Just did a search in the online material database and did not see a Shadow Catcher. Now that would be useful. For those who have not dealt with one, it is a floor material that will only render shadows and lets the background through. It gives you more flexibility over the background.

Will give a go later.

* they also can catch reflections.

Maybe you can make use of Render Channels for that, and then activate Shadow, Object ID and Roughness to get separate passes which you then comp and adjust to control in post.
Just brainstorming out loud here now, i haven't tested this myself but it might work

/ Max

hmm. i'm not sure if you'll be able to get a solution with rendering only once.
but you could try this: (except for the reflections)
activate the "shadow" tick on your floor material and hide the object from camera.

You'll have to composite the two passes, but the options are there. When you render the shadow channel all materials that have that option active will act as shadow catchers.

http://think.maxwellrender.com/special_ ... s-216.html

or refer to the manual.

Yup I went threw that tut and the Matte settings for a material worked fine, just as I expected.

However, when I tried to make a Shadow Catcher it just did not work. Here are my settings for your review.

http://www.intuitionusa.com/1/shadow.jpg

S. Houtzager

It probably is a bug. What happens if you launch the render only with the shadow channel active? It happened in previous versions that if you launched both at the same time it went wrong but worked fine if launched separatedly.

Toooom!

Fernando Tella wrote:It probably is a bug. What happens if you launch the render only with the shadow channel active? It happened in previous versions that if you launched both at the same time it went wrong but worked fine if launched separatedly.

Toooom!

Yes, you must do a shadow channel render separately.

Did the shadow separately, still just white.

S.H.

Are you sure you used the shadow material only on the floor and there is another material applied to the objects? If you have, are you using IBL? There are problems with IBL and shadow pass, it might work ok if the lighting from the IBL has sharper shadows.

Yep, just checked again, all white shadow pass. Tested on V2.0.1 and V2.0.2.
No IBL just physical sky. I will upload the file in a sec.
S.H.

Uncheck "matte" in your shadow material. Only check the "shadow" box.

Got a report from tech support stating that the shadow channel is not working correctly.

SH

maybe this will help,,, its a pain but creat a seperate scene with non specular white material to catch shadows with (youll then be able to multiply it as a shadow in photoshop/compositor) and you can "cut" shadows specific objects out by using object pass(or material pass from fully textured scene) to help sort out shadows on various geometry

hopefully they will fix shadow prob soooon..