Shadow catcher Tweet

[HHbomb]

Hi,
Why can we have a shadow catcher option for material without turning it full white in diffuse, reflection and refraction ?
It would be sooooo nice !!!!

[leehenshall]

Agreed. I basically don't use the shadow catcher in Octane for this reason. Nearly 100% of the time when I am compositing something over a backplate I project the backplate onto the ground plane for more realistic reflections. Currently the shadow catcher does not behave in a way that is useful for this scenario. I guess it was designed with a different workflow in mind.

I don't even use the shadow catcher for shadow passes. I usually just make a white plane and multiply the result in comp so that I can have colour in my shadows.

It would be great if we could use the Shadow Catcher option to cutout everything on the ground plane except the shadow contribution and maybe the reflections that are cast onto the ground plane as an extra option but also keep shader detail in reflections/refractions rather than it turning white.

It needs to be designed in a way that is helpful when previewing cg that is going to be embedded into a backplate.

[HHbomb]

@leehenshall,
I perhaps found a workaround ...
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=71874

[leehenshall]

I recently got round to trying this. It works really well as a workaround.....all hail OSL!

Thankyou so much for sharing this idea HHbomb

Big thanks also to Pascal for his amazing OSL scripts. You should check out his camera projection osl scripts. I use them all the time for backplates.