Shadow catching material possible now?

[Bulwerk]

Now that alpha is supported, is there a way to create a shadow catching material? It would be especially awesome for compositing in AE.

Anyone out there have a method?

P.S. Octane Team thanks for the hard work and the quality product. I try and get everyone I know to get on board!

[abstrax]

Now that alpha is supported, is there a way to create a shadow catching material? It would be especially awesome for compositing in AE.

Anyone out there have a method?

P.S. Octane Team thanks for the hard work and the quality product. I try and get everyone I know to get on board!

Unfortunately not yet. That's something for a later version.

Cheers,
Marcus

[ROUBAL]

There are 3 different and complementary necessary features around shadows :

1 - Shadow catching : a transparent material receiving shadows to composite them in an other software.

2 - Shadow caster : an unvisible material casting shadows to use with billboard cutout trees or cutout persons when the light source is on the side of the billboard.

3 - A button to disable shadows casted by any material, allowing to create cylindrical or spherical backgrounds not blocking the environment light.

[naik3d]

I strongly confirm all three points mate.
Looking forward to it.

cheers

kian

[MaTtY631990]

You can easily achieve, just also doing a tiny colour correcting in photoshop. Using the similar method that was shown in the compositing and alpha pass post from last year sometime. Take a look at these screenshots. it can work for now.
as abstrax mentioned you can camera map your picture onto the plane and use it similar to this.

Alpha channel is turned on

Floor has opacity set to 0


Object has opacity set to 0 and material set to pure white with a little exposure altering just to get it looking white with altering the shadow to much. afterwards you might need to alter the shadow colour slightly.



you can if you want take the saturation out of the scene and play with exposure and gamma to get pure black shadow and use that as luma matte in AE.




Also Pathtracing can only be used for the object rendering otherwise you lose the shadow when the opacity is set to 0.

[arexma]

You can easily achieve, just also doing a tiny colour correcting in photoshop. Using the similar method that was shown in the compositing and alpha pass post from last year sometime. Take a look at these screenshots. it can work for now.
as abstrax mentioned you can camera map your picture onto the plane and use it similar to this.

I really think that's a shady workaround.

When it is only for stills, you can as well create your own alpha maps easily like it was pointed out a few times on the forums already with diffuse white and black materials.
It is rather easy to create an alpha map that mattes out the floor or whatever and leaves the shadow intact - it requires to render a scene 3 times though.

However when it is really troublesome is for animations of any kind, and mostly for animations of any kind pathtracing isn´t exactly the first choise.
It´s also no the best choise to render an animation 3 times just to have nice alpha and shadows for compositing, while I think that Octane would be grand for RL footage compositing with PT.

I +1 the above 3 points, for PT and DL alike.