Workflow for compositing?

[itaki]

Does shadow catcher work in the plug in? That is to say, can I make a render that is the subject and shadow but no background?
I've tried to do this and can't seem to make it happen. I can get the shadows on other materials, but not on the matte material. The shadow just disappears in the render. Knew I must be doing something wrong.

The reason this is important is for compositing my shot in Nuke or AE or Fusion or whatever. My subject, which is 3D, produces a shadow that needs to be composited into my footage. The opacity and softness of the shadow are something better done in a compositing program then trying to get right in C4D. I'm trying to match the shadow that the rest of the footage has so it looks real. The lighting is the hardest thing to get right.

[aoktar]

Hi,
Please could you check this?

[arkanis]

I'm interested too about this topic since we will be soon starting a new project and where evaluating the use of Octane for C4D for some shots where live footage (green key) should be integrated to a 3D scene, but with elements in the background and foreground.

For that we need passes, but we would like to know which passes are supported and which aren't... there is no clear information about this online yet.

Some info would be greatly appreciated !

Thank you,

A.

[itaki]

As far as I can tell Octane only outputs an RGBA beauty pass. I've been using object buffers to output alpha's in the multi-pass, but it's not so much help in that I also need shadows, reflections, spec, AO, etc to do any real relighting in my composites.

I believe at this time, Octane does not calculate these passes. So if you set these up, you will get them, but they will come from the traditional CPU renderer, which 1. will have a different quality and result than that which is in the beauty pass, and 2. will need to be calculated by the CPU, so that means you might as well render the whole thing with the CPU.

I've been wondering how to set up very low cost CPU renders to give me, say, really nice shadows at a very low CPU cost, but just don't know enough about rendering to do it yet. I don't think I could do the same with reflections, but could possibly just use the beauty pass for most things. I mean, with how realtime Octane is I feel like I can get the reflections really close in C4D before the export. Then I just need Object buffers and shadow captures and I can pretty much do anything.

Let me know what you figure out and let's keep the discussion alive.

[itaki]

Hi,
Please could you check this?

This is very helpful. I am able to export an object buffer and knock out the figure which gives me basically a shadow pass. It's not perfect, but I am figuring out a work around for all the various compositing problems.