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Hey guys, just wanted to say thanks for those who helped me with previous questions. I humbly thank you. wanted to apologize for me outburst earlier as well ( for those who saw it). As someone who has learning disability I really hate when peope act a sif havng such a problem makes you stupid. It doesn't it just means that certain concepts take harder to grasp or it takes a work around for me to get it. Everyone has them to varying degrees...when it comes to certain concepts mine can get pretty severe. It manifested when I was a in kidgnertagern drawing images and writing things upside down and backwards--I still see things backwards at times and have to do several checks to make sure my writing is clear to others. I have great difficulties with clock faces (analog, not digital) and cannot read them even as an adult. I have problems with left and right discernment. I figured out fixes for these but it takes me moment longer than others to figure out certain things. When I post a question in the forum I usually have 1) sought out various answers on YouTube as visual presentations help me best--text not so much or 2) read the manual and couldn't either understand the steps or felt it didn't answer the question. I know the world can't revolve around those with disability--but try to understand that not everyone is on the same comprehension playing field and try to be kind. There is also an element, as was proven by the last post, of people who look down on Daz Poser users....I use DAZ because it was the simplest for me to learn. I am sorry for those who choose to judge me based on that and I know I shouldn't have allow antagonistic, biased comments in that regard to make me blow my cool.

My question was simply how to find a quick way to create shadows in octane--the render pass layer thing I read three times but I just don't get it--I find it complicated and confusing. I also have the added dilemma of trying to create them in a 360 environment, so any light sources can't be shown. I was told there was a way to make any plane emissions invisible to the camera--I am not sure I understand how to do that. If someone has a visual example, it would help me greatly.

I can understand disabilities, my son has learning problems and he will have to deal with them for his entire life. Unfortunately the whole 3D universe is very, very complex and has a huge learning curve. My suggestion would be to learn it in small digestible pieces so you don't get overwhelmed. It looks like you are off to a good start, but you have to be in it for the long haul. My son has gotten very good with Blender and has sold some in game content and even made a bit of money off of them. So if you have the will, there is a way.

On to your question, from the images you posted on the other thread it looks like you used the texture environment with the default white color on one of them. That will light the scene evenly from every angle so it will wash out all the shadows. It's like putting millions of lights all around the scene so no shadows. You can light the scene with HDR images but you have to be careful, there are good and bad images out there. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range which means that the images contain much more light information than you can see with your eye. Because of this extra depth in the images, you can use them to illuminate a scene. The bad ones are usually poorly made or don't have the full range that they should have, although they can look good, just don't try and use it for lighting. One thing to check is to make sure you have importance sampling turned on, it's on by default but I like to make sure. What that setting does is make Octane pay more attention to the bright areas of the HDR image. This in turn makes the shadows sharper and more noticeable.

Here is an example of a bad HDR file:
Notice that there isn't much of a shadow and the shadow is very diffuse and indistinct. The area where the sun is doesn't look right because the dynamic range didn't go out far enough to capture the correct brightness there.

Here is an example of a good HDR file:
Notice that the shadow is very sharp and looks much better. I did change the gamma on both HDR files to 1 as they had already been adjusted.

You should play around with some HDR files just to get the feel for them and how they work, or don't work. There are lots of sites on the web where you can download them for free, just do a google search for "free hdri".

Jason