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can someone please put me out of my misery! I've been trying to composite a render onto a background with a shadow and have followed all the right procedures (I think) but I'm getting really odd results with anything other than skydome. It's entirely possible I'm doing it complete wrong but...

NB: the actual result I want in the IBL version (bottom) and, yes, I will be hiding the ground plane to camera when I do the final render)

Skydome Colour Channel

Skydome Shadow Channel - this one seems to give the correct results (same shadow as colour channel)





Physical Sky Colour Channel

Physical Sky Shadow Channel - the shadow actually gets lighter under the back wheels and darker at the front (it's almost as if the shadow darkness is inverted?)





IBL Colour Channel - This is the one I'd like to use (when I get it working!)

Skydome Shadow Channel - similarly inverted as per the Physical Sky example above (only without the hard shadow)


At the moment I'm rendering the colour channel with IBL and then re-rendering the shadow channel with skydome and compositing the two but, obviously, this isn't giving quite the correct shadows.

As I say, it's entirely possible I've made a huge error but can someone please explain what is going on (or correct me on what step I've missed out?)

Thanks!

I haven't run into that before. One thing you might try is to create 2 default materials - one applied to your vehicle and the other applied to the floor (with shadows turned on). And try again. That would at least remove any potential bugs that are interfering with your materials. And if there's anything else in there you can take out/hide/simplify it couldn't hurt. The only thing I can think of, if it's not a bug is that maybe the materials' reflections are too high and it's causing a lot of light to be bounced around down there (from those little clips that doesn't appear to be the case...but it's all I've got).

-Brodie

There are some bugs with the shadow channel currently, with Physical Sky and IBL. As you saw some parts of the shadow look 'inverted'. We're looking to fix this as soon as possible because it's a very important channel.

brodie_geers - thanks for getting back to me so quickly and thanks for the tip, I was just about to try it when...

Mihai - thanks for the confirmation (at least it proves I wasn't going mad!). Please try to fix this as soon as you can, I can see lots of outdoor composites needing this function.

looks like this issue has been solved with the new (2.5) plugins - thanks guys!