United3dArtists Archive

Shadow Catcher is a very useful Reflectance shader.
It catches shadow from virtual object and render the shadows only, leaving the rest of the surfaces where it is applied as transparent.



Unfortunately it is broken in tS7.6 Modeler side : when applied on an object, it catches the shadows but will also render the whole object as plain material. In other words, it is unusable.

I found that when I load tS6.6 scenes that have some Shadow Catcher shaders, the effect renders well in tS7.6.
So, it is not a problem with the render engine (Lightworks), but rather a bug in the built-in shadow catcher in tS7.6 version.

So here is a trick if you want to bring back this feature in a new project :
1. Download the cob file below, and load it in your scene. That's just a text object saying Shadows Catcher
2. Pick up the material from this object ; you will get the shadow catcher shader that works in the Material Editor, and you can adjust the shader settings like color and brightness, then paint any object with it.
3. Don't forget to remove this temporary object from your scene before rendering.

Nice one. I have a shadow pass system for the WS of 7.61 and a compositing technique in Blender that doesn't need alpha (just masks) to create the shadow catcher.

if you get a simple lambert shadow catcher error, you can still render it out and use "multiply" or "subtract" or "darken" composite nodes on your other image you may render out.. I may have to.. make a tutorial... heh.

You have this old topic about shadow catcher in 7.6 modelside with Marcel 's tips.

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