Quick Tip: How to Render a Shadow Pass in Cycles


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http://www.blendertutor.com/shadow-pass-in-cycles/

Hi everyone! I was looking at some old After Effects work that I did, and came across a photo that I had added “3D” text onto with a fake shadow. I decided to recreate the effect in Blender with cycles, and decided to create a quick tutorial!

In this quick tip, we’ll go over how to break apart your scene into separate render layers so that we can properly composite the shadow pass onto the 2D image. We’ll also go over using the “Box Mask” node to mask out areas of a render that we want to remove. In the end we’ll composite the shadow pass, and then the 3D text onto the 2D image.

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47 responses to “Quick Tip: How to Render a Shadow Pass in Cycles”

  1. how can i tick the transparent box (by film in the render menu) with an Backround image (HDR) ?
    i have the Problem,that when i tick the transparent, the backround gets too transparent (there should be that hdr 😀 )

  2. Good tutorial but something seems to have changed between 2.67 and 2.75. Everything broke down after the mix node was added. When I plugged in the image node to the mix node and set it to multiply everything went black and nothing else worked after that.

  3. Mil mil gracias, me ayudó muchísimo su tutorial, de verdad, andaba buscando como hacer esto y por fin lo encuentro, no lo encontré en español pero su tutorial se entiende a la perfección, muchas gracias, Thank You Very Much =D

  4. How would you get your lighted text, like a neon sign cast onto the backround picture. I got my text to light up by going to the global setting and turning on indirect lighting and the approximate tab. but i cant get the back lighting to show on the picture any suggestion?  

  5. Yes…make a 3D tracking Tut.  Let me know when its up!  Your tutorials are great, I've been transitioning from 3DS Max…so far I'm liking Blender as much as I do 3DS Max.  Also'd like to request a tutorial to import blender models into Flash Pro CS5 + if you are able.  Thanks 

  6. while i love that your making tutorials… you are getting caught up on the same problem every youtube teacher does…. all that other stuff, such as the 3d text, the viewport resolution, and the background image,  deserve their own video… i want ONLY to know how to make a transparent material receive shadows… 

  7. Yes, and in Blender you can 3D track* a video or an object and after it's done you have an option to create a tracking scene – this handles all the node setup for you, and you can render immediately after however this works for blender internal and not cycles (not yet anyway). Cycles is relatively new and still heavily developed rendering engine – it's a raytracing engine which supports both CPU and GPU (CUDA) rendering* much like luxrender.
    *i'd like to see these functions in max

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