Shadow mat material to catch shadows (or support for additional ground planes)
I do a lot of custom sign design (room sponsorships, donor walls, etc), and produce 3D renderings of them composited into reference photos I take of where the sign will be installed.
The quality of materials and rendering in Adobe Dimension really has me intrigued, but I need a way to place the 3D model vertically and catch the rendered shadow as if it was set against a wall.
In other software, I create a plane with a shadow mat material to catch the shadow, which is then rendered directly on top of the reference photo set as a background image. Is there a way to achieve this in Dimension?
One option is to rotate the camera and use the ground plane to catch the shadow, but then you loose out on the image matching feature, which is really nice.
Nick Basham
shared this idea
3 comments
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Marden Blake
commented
That is known as shadow catcher. It's a trick to hide the object from the camera view. Not sure we're quite there yet, or how technical this program is planned to become.
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Von Betelgeuse
commented
I work a lot with putting things on walls and one function that is missing is the ability to cast shadows on to a plane (wall) and render ONLY the shadow information that is cast on that plane (wall).
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Flavio Andalo
commented
It would be great if we could turn an object into matte like we do in VRay. This option make the object invisible in the final render but still produce and generate shadow and interact with the lighting. This is great to put objects into real scenes.
You can check VRay docs about the matte properties: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY3MAX/Object+and+Light+Properties#ObjectandLightProperties-MattePropertiesIt looks like the base plane already have this option, it would just need to extend to other objects as an option.