I’m a beginner and I finally figured out how to do this. I have not tested this method extensively, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in all situations.
I’m not sure if this exact method has been shown before, but I made a video tutorial on how to make a shadow plane / shadow only plane. Takes only a few minutes with only a few nodes.
Basically if you want to composite CG footage with a shadow onto live footage, this should help.
Did some tests with that shadow catcher problem too… Maybe you have an idea how to do shadowcatcher things with meshlights in the scene?! Would be cool to have an solution for that.
Cycles’ shadow pass currently does not register shadows from environment lighting (e. g. HDRIs) and mesh lights (aka lumigons) - this is a rather severe limitation any compositing-based shadow catcher solution has to live with at the moment.
Very nice tutorial , the most easy one so far. But there are one problem with this method.
I did setup everything exactly as you did, but if a instead of using color (green) use an image, the image show up on the plane but not everywhere else. I have attached my scene. So if you or somebode would take a look to see if I did something wrong i would be very happy.
Never min , I found out why it was not working, he did a small mistake with the color mix mode, that he later on corrected, I missed that one So now ladies and gentlemen we have a working “shadow catcher” in Blender Cycles. Thank you sooo much to you mrd777
and you are a beginner? some similar method have been shown before yes, but not as easy as this one. You are a genius
Yes, I’m a beginner, but I got lucky and some how figured this out. I found some other stuff “similar” to what I was trying, but not queite exact. I played around for a few hours and viola. Lucky me eh?
I had product visualization job and client asked for images with transparent background and shadows. I had few mesh lights and HDRI so shadowpass didn’t helped me a lot. Here’s how I did it. My approach is based on user Negativa setup.