So I have a scene, where a building is standing on a blank, white plane. The scene is lit with and HDR image.
I want to catch the shadows on the plane, without the plane.
When I set a material parameter Matte to the plane, it disappears from the scene and renders the shadows fine.
The problem is that the building got shaded in a very different way. That's because the white plane was contributing to the buildings shading. It was reflecting the rays comming from the sky, and these rays were lighting up the building more.
When I set the "matte" option on, the white plane actually acts as if it wasn't there at all - it stops reflecting rays.
I tried creating a copy of this plane and putting it below the shadow catcher (just beneath the camera view) so that other plane would reflect these rays. But it seems that the shadow catcher doesn't let these reflected rays through.
My other idea would be to render two passes. One without the plane -> just the building. And another pass with the white plane and the buildings visibility turned off.
Just like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXxrPj7-Mu8
The problem with this actually is I can't find this option in modo plugin. I guess this is a question for the modo-plugin sub-forum.
here's a render with a blank white plane:
here's the plane with "matte" turned on:
and here's the comparison in the lighting of these two scenarios.
In this very simple scene and the it's not very drastinc in the way the shadows behave, more of a color shift to blue, but in a more complexe scene the lack of the plane reflecting the sky rays is much more noticable.
Any way to have the same lighting and catch the shadows?
