render layers - black/coloured shadow pass

[fatfreemedia]

Hi all,

I'm trying to render out an animation in a series of passes in order to do some effects in comp. 99% of what I want to achieve seems to be working perfectly, but the only thing baffling me is the black and coloured shadow pass.

I'm rendering alpha so as far as I'm aware this should enable black shadows, but both that and the colour shadow pass are completely empty. Coloured reflections are working perfectly fine. Here's the thumbnails from the picture viewer:



and here are my render settings:



I'm using the most recent standalone and C4D plugin (3.06)

Cheers
Dan

[fatfreemedia]

I've discovered that you need to disable coloured shadows to get the black shadow pass. Now in the black shadow pass I get this artifact:



Does anyone know what this is?

[niestudio]

see this thread viewtopic.php?f=30&t=56386&start=10#p301206

Black dots will not show when your shadow layer is underneath your object in compositing.

[fatfreemedia]

I'm not worried about the black dots, that's fine and I'm aware that they will not be seen. It's the large horizontal stripe across the middle of the pass that troubles me.

It looks as if there's no shadow on that part of the render, but that's simply not the case when you look at the beauty pass in the LV.

[fatfreemedia]

Now looking at the picture viewer results I can see that only the layer reflection pass is visible. No black shadows.



Is there something I'm missing here? It seems like I'm doing everything as per the instructions in the manual. Feels like it might be a bug.

[fatfreemedia]

I've uploaded a very simple test scene. This was created with R18 (most recent update) with Octane standalone and Octane for C4D both on 3.06 stable. Layer reflections work as expected; black shadows are broken.

render layer test_001.zip

(71.13 KiB) Downloaded 171 times

[bepeg4d]

Hi fatfreemedia,
sorry but I don't understand the issue, if you want to see the black shadow of the cube on the plane, you have to switch to Layer 2:

ciao beppe

[fatfreemedia]

It works in the live viewer. It doesn't work in the picture viewer. There's nothing, just a black image. Layer reflections work fine.

[bepeg4d]

HI fatfreemedia,
sorry, you are right, only black output with Tif and PSD.
The workaround is to switch to EXR or PNG16.

ciao beppe

[aoktar]

HI fatfreemedia,
sorry, you are right, only black output with Tif and PSD.
The workaround is to switch to EXR or PNG16.

ciao beppe

Blackshadows are fine if you open in AE and put a solid color behind that. It's black layer as their name and just operates by embedded alpha. Also users should not use C4D's save section for passes. It causes some problems like this. Plugin handles all saving operations when Octane's save section for passes.